Not Just a Hobby: Worldbuilding and Its Potential Uses in the Classroom
Szeyuen Qi
28/09/2026
Worldbuilding–the creation of fictional worlds through maps, storylines, and timelines–is usually treated as an extracurricular hobby. In this paper, I argue that it could also support comprehension, retention, and interactivity in the classroom, when educators prioritize cohesion, realism, and quality over quantity. The focal artifacts are three projects that I developed in my free time outside formal education and that exemplify the possibilities of worldbuilding in education. The first artifact, “A Quick Demonstration”, is a thirty-minute doodle that illustrates how even a brief exercise may engage geographic and historical reasoning. The second artifact, Atrica, is a map detailing a snapshot from a tense geopolitical time period taking a few days. The third artifact, Laticika, is a timeline-oriented chronicle with mainly writing and supplementary diagrams and maps to enhance comprehensibility done over a week. Through an artifact-centered autoethnographic self-study and reflexive thematic analysis, I show how the worldbuilding process exercises, challenges, and elevates historical knowledge, critical thinking, reasoning, and human geography. I propose how worldbuilding can be utilized in the classroom, provide design samples, assessment criteria, an adaptable task template, and advice for equitable participation. This case suggests that worldbuilding may bridge youth interests and disciplinary learning by making imagination accountable to geographic evidence and explanation.