Global society demands continuous modification and enhancements to traditional teaching and learning to prepare students for the complex 21st century world. Higher education (HE) instructors in South African institutions are faced with unique challenges as the student populace is often culturally, socially, and linguistically diverse and also comes from varying socioeconomic backgrounds. To ensure student success, HE instructors should employ innovative human-centred design (Human-Vogel and Du Plessis 2024) strategies to respond to diverse student needs, improve performance and knowledge retention, and to increase motivation levels. Problem statement – How can game-based learning (GBL) be applied through human-centred design to shape impactful futures for Extended Programme South African art and design students? The Extended Curriculum Programme (ECP) accepts students who are inadequately prepared for HE, providing them with the necessary disciplinary knowledge and skills to prepare them for the mainstream Design and Studio Art course. However, South Africa’s education inequalities contribute to this under-preparedness, making it crucial to provide additional support and innovative teaching methods to improve the academic success of ECP students (Khumalo & Sibanda 2023 and Human-Vogel & Du Plessis 2024). Guided by a human-centred design approach, a History of Art and Design analogue GBL (Maratou et al. 2023 and Rye 2023) activity was created for ECP students at a South African university of techology. Human-centred design approach emphasises the prioritisation of the students’ needs (Human-Vogel & Du Plessis 2024 and Landry 2020), hence the GBL activity was created with an empathetic understanding of our student’s learning challenges, with a priority on student centredness. Students’ performance in the History of Art and Design tests was assessed, revealing challenges with discipline knowledge, terminology, and language barriers. The GBL exercise aimed to address these learning barriers through tangible analogue game elements. Prior learning was considered to enable an inclusive learning environment. Therefore, students did not require prior competency in computer literacy. To make the workload manageable, game cards consisted of cognitive memory questions and convergent questions (Festo 2016 and Asking good questions 2008). This also reduced the cognitive load while facilitating the retention of knowledge (Rye 2023). Ethical considerations included student anonymity and the agreement by students to participate in the activity. This research study explored the impact of this GBL activity implemented as an active learning tool on ECP Design and Studio Art students guided by human-centred design principles. In this study, Human-centred design was employed as a theoretical framework merged with a social constructivism lens. Findings indicate that engaging with analogue game elements promotes active learning, allowing art and design students to relate theoretical knowledge to real-world contexts. The outcomes of the test written post the deployment of the History of Art and Design GBL activity showed improved student performance, knowledge retention, and increased motivation level. Therefore, this paper contributes to the larger discourse on the use of innovative pedagogical methods to enhance teaching and learning in design education. By employing a human-centred design approach to game-based learning, this study demonstrates that GBL could shape impactful futures by effectively transforming traditional pedagogical strategies to enable active learning for ECP art and design students.