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This paper reports on a study exploring the use of university students as co-creators when designing activities for an emergent teaching practice such as gamification, using emergent technologies in a Swedish K-12 education context. More specifically, the aim was to empirically explore and develop knowledge about the process of designing for gamification teaching in K-12 education, to develop gamification teaching design principles and, in addition, to study how emergent technologies could be used in this context. Four sub-studies were conducted between 2014 and 2018 which included four groups of university students as co-creators in the teaching designs. The empirical material is based on observations from the field test in which school students tested university student designs. Post interviews were conducted with participating school teachers and university students. In addition, university student written reports were included. Findings illustrate four themes; 1) The design process of the gamification teaching activities, 2) The gamification teaching design principles developed, 3) The school students’ experiences of the gamification designs and 4) Designing gamification teaching activities – a complex process. Findings show that designing for gamification teaching designs using emergent technologies is quite a complex process. This complexity concerns, among other things, the puzzle of combining the different knowledge domains into the TPACK Model (i.e. technological knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, content knowledge) in an emergent teaching practice (gamification) with the use of emergent technologies. The co-creation process and the move between these knowledge domain areas could maximize the effect of achieving a pedagogical balance concerning what school students perceive as fun without sacrificing focus on their knowledge acquisition and learning processes.