Health Guardians 2030 is a nationwide educational challenge commissioned by the Pfizer Foundation and developed by Ignite Serious Play, designed to bring the UN Sustainable Development Goals to life for primary and secondary students through Minecraft Education Edition.

I joined the project as the Immersive Learning Experience Designer with end-to-end ownership of the experience: world architecture, UX flow, three-act narrative structure, interaction design, defensive UX systems, environmental storytelling, and testing strategy. I worked in close collaboration with a Minecraft World Designer, directing the technical build while treating the relationship as genuinely complementary.

The first edition reached 680 students across 22 schools. I led a comprehensive redesign for the second edition, scaling the project to 5,250 students across 70 schools nationwide. Following our two editions, the Pfizer Foundation commissioned 3 further editions on the back of the programme's success.

The Pfizer Foundation had a clear ambition: make 17 dense, abstract global goals exciting and actionable for students who had never heard of the SDGs. The pedagogical challenge was significant enough on its own.

The technical constraint made it harder. Minecraft Education Edition world files do not support remote updates. Once the world file was downloaded and distributed to schools across Spain, any error in the game logic, any broken challenge, any point where a student could get irreversibly stuck could not be fixed remotely. The experience had to work perfectly, in every school, on every device, from the moment it launched.

This was not a product that could ship with known bugs and patch them later. Every design and engineering decision had to account for the fact that this world, once released, was final.

I designed the experience as a three-act narrative arc across three distinct regions, each covering a different thematic cluster of SDG challenges. The structure was deliberate: segmenting the world prevented cognitive overload, gave students a clear sense of progress, and allowed us to isolate and resolve technical issues in earlier regions before they could propagate into more complex systems.

A 12-year-old working through a complex SDG challenge in Minecraft, surrounded by classmates, on a school network, with a teacher who may not know the game: this is the real user. The interaction design had to account for every way things could go wrong.

I engineered what I called a Defensive Design system across all 17 challenges. Every single interaction station was built with four layers of support:

Behind each region, I designed and built an invisible backend validation room using Minecraft Command Blocks. This hidden infrastructure continuously checked the world state against success criteria, verified that students had completed each challenge correctly, and triggered the teleportation to the next region only when all conditions were met.

It was the most technically demanding part of the project. Every logic chain had to be correct before the world shipped, because there was no way to fix it once schools had downloaded the file.

Given the non-patchable constraint, the testing strategy was the most critical phase of the project. I designed and led a three-stage approach:

First, internal stress testing, where I acted as a disruptive user, attempting to break game logic, skip challenges, and trigger every edge case I could find. Second, lecturer validation, testing the experience with teachers to confirm they could guide their classes through the flow confidently. Third, student UAT conducted with students from our own Minecraft afterschool classes, observing real behaviour and resolving friction points before the school launch.

The result was 100% system stability across 70 different school technical environments in the second edition, with no critical disruptions reported at any school during the programme.

The non-patchable constraint is a design brief in itself.
Treating it that way from the start, rather than as a technical risk to manage at the end, would have shaped every decision earlier and more deliberately. Constraints are not problems to solve; they are the frame that makes the design better.