Programme
The 2019 programme was as below. Session leads have been adding reflections, resources and challenges to continue the thinking through the year: look out for activity sections below:
Resources, Challenges, Reflections
There are also challenges from our Thursday Sessions and other activities : see our activities page for these.
Full abstracts are available as a PDF Download.
| WEDS 10 JULY | THURS 11 JULY | FRI 12 JULY | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Morning | 08:30-09:30 Registration | 08:00-09:00 Run, Postie, Run! 08:30-09:30 Registration |
|
| 09:00-12:00 Fringe Event | 09:30-11:00 Parallel Sessions 4: 51 | 46 | 30 | 8 | 09:30-10:30 Parallel Sessions 7: 21 | 39 | 31 | 12 |
|
| Coffee | 11:00-12:00 Registration and coffee | 11:00-11:30 | |
| 11:30-12:30 Welcome to Day 2 | Keynote 2: Zuraida Buter | 10:45-11:45 Parallel Sessions 8: 4 | 19 | 62 |
||
| Lunch | 12:00-12:45 | 12:30-13:30 | 12:00-13:00 Keynote 3: James Charnock Endgame |
| Afternoon | 12:45-14:00 Welcome | Keynote 1: Alison James | 13:30-14:30 Parallel Sessions 5: 13 + 49 | 63 | 2 | 67 | 13:00 Close Packed Lunch |
| 14:15-15:15 Parallel Sessions 1: 6 + 22 | 27 | 42 | 50 | 14:45-15:45 Parallel Sessions 6: 54 + 56 | 11 | 53 | 32 | ||
| 15:30-16:30 Parallel Sessions 2: 43 + 18 | 52 | 40 | 5 | |||
| Break & Refreshments 16:30-17:00 | 16:00-18:00 Thursday Project Slot (Escape Rooms, LARPs, etc.) | ||
| 17:00-18:00 Parallel Sessions 3: 61 + 35 | 28 | 45 | |||
| Evening | 19:00 Evening event, at venue (outdoors) | 19:00 Evening Meal (at venue) |
Short Abstracts
Parallel Sessions 1
6. Build a Beastie! Using WordPress to playfully engage & support students. (30 minutes)
Samantha Clarke; Sylvester Arnab
Come and play with the idea of using WordPress as a cheap, cheerful and open-source way to playfully engage audiences and create communities. Bothersome Beasties and Beauty & the Beasties, will be explored to see how creating ‘fantastic beasts’ can help students creatively reflect on their learning journey. Participants are invited to ‘build their own beastie’!
22. The Bourdieu Game (30 minutes)
Cheryl Reynolds
In this session, you will play The Bourdieu Game. You’ll be allocated social and cultural credit cards and take them into various fields to explore who stands to profit most and come out with the most symbolic capital at the end of the game. It will enable you to grasp Bourdieu’s broader conception of capital and the complex interplay between field and habitus.
27. “Tough, challenging and an eye opener on teamwork”. Using an escape room game as an induction activity on a postgraduate course. (60 minutes)
Susan Haywood; Sue Roberts
The induction programme for the MA Education at the University of South Wales includes an escape room game. In this session you can try some of the puzzles used in the game and reflect on the students’ views of the interpersonal and problem-solving skills they used playing it.
42. Students as co-creators of visual mnemonics for revision: a case study with undergraduate Psychology students using Lego® (60 minutes)
Rachel Stead
This workshop will reflect on preliminary findings of our UG Psychology session using an adapted Lego® Serious Play® approach to collaborative revision for exams. Participants will also have the chance to try out Lego® activities and consider applicability to their own discipline or field.
50. Making good change – design a retrospective session with mapping and use of Lego Serious Play (60 minutes; limited to 10)
Alicja Shah
Retrospectives – what they are, why you should consider making them a part of your team’s culture and how can you design one. Visualise and reflect with Lego Serious Play, create your team’s personal map and design a tailored retrospective session. Make good change happen!
Parallel Sessions 2
43. Academic Writing – a piece of cake?: Using visual analogy to demystify the writing process. (30 minutes)
Amanda Whitehead; Anne-Marie Greenhill
Is academic writing a piece of cake? Our students told us it is and they proved it. Come and share your thoughts on the academic writing process and compare them to what our students produced. This session will involve teamwork, communication and some drawing – no previous skills required!
A Challenge
Please see the following link to a Google doc with more instructions. https://docs.google.com/
document/d/ 1KGt6o7C2ERTdqEYKuD29AirIfnKEK ipNa6CWcI1sFi8/edit?usp= sharing
18. Failing Safely: A Case Study with Zombies (30 minutes)
Jill MacKay; Alex Corbishley; Hamish Macleod; Katie Stein; Jessie Paterson; Susan Rhind
In this study, we supported veterinary students through a zombie apocalypse roleplay scenario to explore communication skills and failure.
52. Bringing in the experts without shutting out the public (60 minutes)
Adam Boal
Many event developers want to bring in experts and use expertise to engage the public in accessible and inclusive environments. From sex robot protests to responding to a mock bio-terror attack, we’ll look at how we brought in experts with playful events that challenged the participants with new, controversial technologies.
40. Compassionate identities through student play: creative approaches to contesting the harms of HE (60 minutes)
Jessica Hancock
This workshop argues for a focus on compassion in HE, with playful learning as a productive way to explore identity and compassion with HE students. Participants will hear about the use of Lego to promote compassionate approaches to identity, and use play to consider the benefits for their own contexts.
5. Gamification of cell biology using the Playstation game Little Big Planet (Foyer activity)
Sam Charlesworth; Jo Rushworth
We designed an inclusive, PlayStation-based learning tool for first year undergraduate cell biology students. The LittleBigPlanet game was used to develop a game in which the player controls a scientist character and has to match the descriptions of organelles with images. This improved students’ test scores and was found to be useful for a diverse group of students.
Parallel Sessions 3
61. embedding playfulness in mathematics: building an evidence base (30 minutes,)
Andrew Wilson; Michael McEwen
Embedding playfulness in HE yields exceptional levels of student satisfaction, engagement & attainment. The attributes & skills required for the teacher to create such safe, playful & failure-friendly learning spaces will be exposed through insights from a study of these transformative playfulness pedagogies in large mathematics cohorts together with participant discussion.
35. Close encounters of the critical kind: An exploration of problem-based learning within a Learning Development context (30 minutes)
Zara Hooley; Bev Hancock-Smith
Join the DMU team to experience an immersive ‘close encounter of the critical kind’. Delegates can escape the alien invasion by undertaking a series of critical writing challenges whilst the extra-terrestrials monitor their responses. Following the playtest we will lead a reflective discussion.
28. PuzzlEd (60 minutes)
Leisa Nichols-Drew; Dr Angela O’Sullivan; Dr Annette Crisp; Joanne Bacon; Dr Marie Bassford; Dr Mark Fowler; Marisol Martinez-Lees
PuzzlEd is an innovative, immersive learning activity influenced by escape rooms. It utilises bespoke interdisciplinary and constructivist approaches to underpin interactive and transferable learning, teaching and assessment tools. Teams engage with avatars to solve challenging ‘hands-on’ puzzles. We invite you… find the clues, unlock the padlocks…time is ticking!
45. Do you speak Alien? (60 minutes)
Darren Green; Lluisa Astruc
Participants in a team game had to learn aspects of an alien language to communicate with a team of alien players. They had to deduce vocabulary and syntactic (sentence formation) and morphological (word-formation) rules. Embedding this activity in a team game context contributed greatly to motivation and success.
Parallel Sessions 4
51. Inclusive Playful Engagement Strategy development (90 minutes)
Stephanie (Charlie) Farley
University of Edinburgh’s Information Services Group has a Playful Engagement strategy, but how do we ensure that it’s inclusive for our diverse staff and student body? Join us as we use playful methods to inclusively discuss accessibility and equality when implementing playful engagement as a strategy for an educational institution.
46. Creating Educational Gameshows: Cracking your own Crystal Maze (90 minutes)
Emma Gillaspy; Neil Withnell
WILL YOU START THE FANS PLEASE! You will be immersed into three educational editions of the Crystal Maze, earning time crystals in each one before entering the Crystal Dome. Having played the game, you will design your own edition of the Crystal Maze to share with the playful learning community.
30. Bring a brick…’: Using Improvisation Techniques to build Confidence in Public Speaking (90 minutes)
Lynne Crook
This is a practical workshop, intended to involve participants in improvisational exercises designed to help build confidence in public speaking. It will encourage the group to work with one another, viewing interaction as a ‘gift’ not a challenge. Be prepared to be active!
Resources and Challenge
A few people in my session asked for some further resources. I’d like to point you in the direction of Improv Encyclopedia: http://improvencyclopedia.org/
That comes with the challenge of incorporating an improv game into one of your sessions! And a request that you let me know how it’s going if you really decide to go for it on the improv front: lynne.crook@UA92.ac.uk
8. Framework of fun (90 minutes, outside)
The Rumpus Group
This will be a fun way to identify the elements of fun. Using the outside space we will use a variety of media (including balloons) to draw out people’s ideas, and develop a shared understanding of what fun is, and what contributes to it.
Parallel Sessions 5
13. “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…” A Picture book approach to teaching referencing and citation (30 minutes)
Darren Flynn
This session will demonstrate a method of teaching citation and referencing using narrative and children’s picture books. Delegates will hear the rationale and participate in a demonstration which includes writing their own picture book. There will be time for delegates to ask questions and give feedback on the approach.
49. Level 47 Half-Academic Researcher (30 minutes)
Ian J. Turner; Louise A. Robinson
Academic Writing Skills: 67
Presenting at Conferences: 74
Dealing with Pesky Administrative Tasks: 92
…working in any profession comes with its own set of skills.. This workshop uses the unique style of a role-playing game (RPG) character sheet to create a fun approach to developing a curriculum vitae (CV).
63. ‘Models’ of Ethical Behaviour (60 minutes)
Lauren Traczykowski
Be a model of ethical action: create models of ethical action. This multisensory activity begins with an introduction to ethics. Participants then create art – paintings, models, videos – to answer an ethical question. Creating art provides the opportunity for inclusive and critical learning and self-taught skills in answering difficult ethics questions.
2. Giving permission for playful learning (60 minutes)
Andrew Walsh
Examining how we give our learners, permission to play, with findings from recent interviews providing examples of the different ways in which this happens. We will play a reflective game, enabling participants to reflect upon the barriers, and ways to overcome them, to playful learning within their own practice.
Resources and Challenge
For lots more on how we might enable adults to play, please see my latest article! https://doi.org/10.5920/jpa.565
I’d love if attendees could think about how they enable play to happen and then create a short video, draw a picture, or write it out (and take a pic)! Then send me a link to it at a.p.walsh@hud.ac.uk and I’ll link them all together somewhere 🙂
67. Playful Learning – meet the book (60 minutes)
Editors and chapter authors for Playful Learning
Join the editors and chapter authors of the recently published Playful Learning – Events and Activities to Engage Adults (Routledge, 2019). We’ll play some of the case studies from the book, in between conversations and Q&As with the authors.
Parallel Sessions 6
54. Quodl: Easy gamified quizzes to wake up the traditional lecture (30 minutes)
Stian Reimers
We developed Quodl (www.quodl.co.uk) for live in-lecture quizzes, letting students compare scores with their peers and earn badges and prizes over time. As well as demoing the web app, I will report back on the insights gained from using it with 500 students last term – both challenges and opportunities.
56. Constructing the Playful Interactive Experience: An Analysis of FouskoPolis Limassol (30 minutes)
Anna Merry; Dr Rene Carraz
Through an analysis of nine dimensions for constructing a ‘Playful Interactive Experience,’ this presentation displays the case study of a temporary and playful public space event. The main tool, a giant inflatable tube aimed to encourage engagement through design and playfulness, thus promoting play permission as a catalyst for change.
11. Be less boring in the classroom (60 minutes)
Katie Piatt; Helen Sykes
40 ways for you to bring play to the everyday Remove the boring associated with introductions, group work, webinars and feedback sessions. Leave with a bag of tricks and the confidence to use them.
53. Students As Producers: Designing Games To Teach Social Science Research Methods & Ethics (60 minutes)
Dr Natalia Gerodetti; Dr Darren Nixon
The session is proposed to be a 60 minute game session demonstrating both games in use as well as demonstrating our approach in designing them together with students.
32. Doing the twist – Learn(ful) playing (60 minutes, outside)
Josef Florian Micallef
An initial discussion proposes how educational game design can better reach anticipated learning goals if it focus primarily on what matters most – solid gameplay. Through a playful activity session, it is proposed that engaging gameplay acts as a solid foundation for any learning message/experience the designer intends to elicit.
Parallel Sessions 7
21. The tiddlywinks of teaching (60 minutes)
Chrysanthi Tseloudi, Suzi Wells
Who is included or excluded from your learning game? What barriers are you putting up? Who is not invited to the ball? Through the time-honoured mechanism of tiddlywinks, this game helps participants explore issues around accessibility and inclusivity. Designed to work with learning games but applicable to other educational approaches.
Resources
Materials from the session, for your own use. Contact the authors to pass on your experiences if you use them!
39. Playful reflection with swollage (60 minutes)
Kaye Towlson; Julia Reeve
Swollage is a collage driven thinking technique enabling inspiration, exploration and reflection. During this session you will produce a mood board as a generative tool to support articulation, personal stories, attributes and insights leading to reflection upon personal, academic and professional growth. Take your Swollage home and continue your reflection.
Reflections
31. Thinking Outside the Big Brain Box (60 minutes)
Carmen F. Ionita; Jayesha Chudasama; Elizabeth McManus
The Big Brain Box is based on the concept of a portable escape room and it challenges teams of players to work together for solving a series of riddles in order to discover key learning messages about the human brain and episodic memory.
Resources and Challenge
A challenge: how could we integrate learning in the gameplay itself rather than as ‘an attachment’ that is not needed to actually play the game?
12. Harnessing the wow factor – Embracing play and exploring empathy in VR Learning (60 minutes)
Stephan Caspar; Sébastian Dubreil
Exploring the design and affordances of the Askwith Kenner Global Languages Room at Carnegie Mellon University, this talk highlights the transition from the physical space to effective, innovative (foreign) language and culture pedagogy. What can the emotions of play in VR tell us about learning and how can we use them to develop new content and shape new experiences?
Parallel Sessions 8
4. SCOOT3 (60 minutes) Martyn Ruks Welcome to the new and exciting field of Time Science! In this session you’ll work with the other audience members to help our SCOOT3 supercomputer operator complete their “time orchestration” experiment. However, this is no game and you’ll need communication and problem solving skills to achieve success. Observe, strategise and execute, time travel has never been so fun!
19. Playing at the edge of Democracy (60 minutes)
Mathias Poulsen
As a reaction to the current crisis of democracy, this workshop explores civic, playful participation through “Democratic Play Labs”. These labs, like this workshop, are designed around deep play experiences, inviting participants to get properly immersed in play before engaging in facilitated reflection and conversation.
62. Using play in leadership development (60 minutes)
Susannah Quinsee
This session will consider how play based learning can facilitate the development of educational leaders in higher education. By exploring the use of a range of play based techniques used in leadership development settings it will discuss how these can enable greater engagement and deeper exploration of leadership challenges.