What if students could experience AI governance firsthand not through lectures, but by drafting laws, debating ethical trade-offs, and voting on decisions that shape a fictional AI-powered society?
Neuralforming is a hybrid board game designed for secondary school classrooms. It transforms students into members of a democratic parliament tasked with regulating artificial intelligence: they propose legislation, challenge each other’s arguments, and vote on policies that balance innovation, privacy, and collective rights.
The game is built entirely on open tools and distributed under a free license, so any school or educator can adopt, remix, and localise it without cost or vendor dependency. The physical and digital components are designed to work with off-the-shelf hardware and free software, making it deployable even in under-resourced schools.
In this lightning talk, I will walk through the design principles behind Neuralforming, share early feedback from classroom sessions, and discuss why game-based civic education may be one of the most scalable paths toward genuine digital literacy, the kind that equips the next generation not just to use technology, but to govern it.
