By Rivky Mondal

Photo by Hexacago Health Academy

October 15, 2025

For ten summers, the Hexacago Health Academy (HHA) has brought South Side high school students into the heart of public health research—through play. Based at the University of Chicago’s Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3), the program invites teens to design games on topics such as teenage pregnancy, food insecurity, and STI prevention. Student-made prototypes are refined by Ci3 researchers into learning tools for classrooms and families. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, games like Hearsay (about youth sexual health), Babyburg (about parenthood), and Smokestacks (about tobacco advertising) show how young people’s creativity can fuel serious health education.

From the start, the Academy has amplified student voices. The program grew out of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab, founded by reproductive health scholar Melissa Gilliam and media scholar Patrick Jagoda, Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies. Gilliam saw that adolescent health research often warned teens about risks and interviewed them for survey data, but rarely gave teens space to shape interventions. Together, Gilliam and Jagoda asked: what if young people were not just subjects but designers of research?

“By pairing public health research with human-centered design principles, HHA expanded the ways people can think together about adolescent sexual and reproductive health,” Jagoda explained. “Games combine elements of art and science, intuition and rationality, play and serious thought. Given young people's interest in games, they are a compelling way to bring youth into the co-design of systems that influence their health and well-being.”

That insight drives the program’s success. Games turn students into scientists, prompting them to conduct research, weigh trade-offs, and test solutions with peers. As Ci3 Faculty Director Lee Hasselbacher noted, the format supports pathways into STEM for underrepresented groups. By making health research less intimidating and more collaborative, HHA encourages students to view themselves as qualified participants in science and medicine. The Youth Council, composed of high-school juniors and seniors, extends impact through peer mentorship, which studies show is crucial for increasing confidence and spreading knowledge. 

The humanities are a vital part of this bridgework. Living under the umbrella of the Chicago School of Game Design—with the Weston Game Lab and Fourcast Lab—Game Changer Chicago Design Lab focuses on extending the academic field of game studies through video, board, and alternate reality games, precisely through applied practice and unique design.

Design, Jagoda noted, draws from techniques in art and storytelling to make abstract systems tangible. In an icebreaker activity at the summer Academy, students each represented a social institution—a grocery store, the Supreme Court, a household—and held a string connecting them. When one student tugged, everyone felt the pull, dramatizing how interconnected structures shape daily life.

Research confirms what students experience firsthand: games invite curiosity, foster optimism, and provide a safe space for failure and replay. As HHA researchers observed in a recently published study, gameplay enables students to “read” their worlds. They see themselves within social forces and process learning through dialogue and emotional connection. Also, fun opens doors to difficult conversations. As Jagoda put it, “Design brings together the humanities and arts, theory and practice, social science and material change in the world.”

HHA’s results are scaling outward. Teachers across Chicago are testing its games in their classrooms, and more than 80 Chicago Public Library branches have received materials, reaching thousands of young people. Curricula now instruct students in how to recreate games and build their own. The impact is clear: greater confidence, deeper understanding of their worlds, and stronger connections among different age groups.

As HHA’s second NIH grant comes to a close, the team is working to make its resources freely available. The program underscores the precarity of federal investment in humanities-driven research. When support disappears, so too do opportunities for cross-disciplinary, community-rooted projects that help young people see themselves as agents of change. The Academy’s ten-year milestone is both a celebration and a reminder of what is at stake.

For UChicago, HHA embodies how the humanities catalyze field-defining collaborations. In a single classroom, students engage literature and narrative through story-driven games, social science through simulations, and medicine through health data. Teens leave with sharper tools for making informed decisions about their health and futures.

In ten years, the Academy has shown that game design is not just a teaching tool, but also a methodology for connection. It empowers teens to voice their experiences, helps researchers listen, and translates scholarship into forms that shape classrooms, families, and policy. As UChicago celebrates its year-long, university-wide Year of Games, HHA stands as a flagship of what can happen when art, science, and youth imagination collide: new knowledge, healthier communities, and a generation better equipped to roll the dice.

The Division extends its gratitude to Madeline Quasebarth, Jessica Wilks, Yaz Stites, Sophie Knifton, Vanya Manthena, Robin Michelle Cogdell, Mason Arrington, Lee Hasselbacher, Ashlyn Sparrow, and Patrick Jagoda for their dedication and contributions to this work.

For an open access and multimedia book covering ten years of Hexacago Health Academy, follow this link.