CINDER Blocks gives interdisciplinary teams a shared structure for producing immersive educational narratives, translating the moving parts of content, instruction, narrative, development, and educational resourcing into a practical workflow.
Introduction: Production Is an Educational Design Problem
Immersive narratives are often treated as a technical deliverable, even though their educational quality depends on early alignment among disciplinary expertise, instructional intent, story structure, production capacity, and material resources. CINDER Blocks frames that alignment as a central design problem rather than a coordination afterthought.
Framework: Five Interdependent Commitments
CINDER identifies five commitments—Content, Instruction, Narrative, Development, and Educational Resourcing—and makes the dependencies among them explicit. The accompanying worksheet gives project leads prompts for defining ownership, negotiating constraints, and tracing every narrative decision back to a learning objective.
Evidence: A Meteorology-Lab Case Study
The framework was developed and tested through Hurricane Heroes, an introductory meteorology lab implemented across iterative rounds of testing and a full course deployment. The study reports gains in student self-efficacy, achievement, and enjoyment, while showing how a structured interdisciplinary workflow can make ambitious immersive learning projects more reproducible.