Programme-2018

Programme

Details of all the creative, practice-based and research-based sessions that took place at Playful Learning 2018 are below.

Rather than simply providing slides/materials, we asked our presenters to issue a challenge to you, to extend your learning and thinking further. Look out for these boxes below: they’ll be appearing gradually over the Summer.

Short Abstracts

Activities

Sticky Fun
Mark Childs and Rosie Jones

What do we mean by fun? Can we come up with definitions that will help us as educators? Can you help us make up this activity as we go along?

Sticky walls have been used in workshops for a while now – but can they work as an installation to draw in ideas over time, organise them, get some answers? We don’t know, but we’re hoping to find out.

Rosie Jones and Mark Childs from the Open University will set up a sticky wall, set up some prompts, leave everyone to it, and see if something emerges. Add your thoughts, add some pictures, move things around, add some more ideas. Or just be random. It’s in your hands.

Mark and Rosie have categorised the outputs from their exercise into five categories – check them out for ideas to integrate into your own work and practice:

• Change the way you work
• Create a playful environment
• Reduce the boring stuff
• Reflect and be aware of playful things
• How to ‘tit about’ (in reference to Emma Corrigan’s keynote)

Parallel Sessions 1

34. Digital Game Design for Everyone: Design Your Very First Video Game Using Twine (No Experience Required!) (90 mins)
Ashley Darrow

Have you ever wanted to make a video game? This session will walk you through basic game development using the popular platform Twine. Participants will design their first game alongside the facilitator, and then design their own games with the facilitator there to assist. (No prior experience required!)

32. Campus Crisis: an alternate reality game about sustainability (90 mins)
Rebecca Dye

Come and play Campus Crisis, an alternate reality game about sustainability. In this workshop we will play, think and reflect on teaching big issues through ARGs. We will explore the use of narrative tension and emotional connection to provoke deep learning, and empower students.
Please download Blippar to play!

12. Student-created Serious Games: The Bachelor of Serious Games at the University of the Sunshine Coast (90 mins)
Sandie Elsom, Marguerite Westacott

During this interactive workshop, you will be introduced to the Bachelor of Serious Games at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. Together, we will play our way through your degree, from a collaborative ARG at orientation, through playful science and sociology classes, to an Instagram-based emotional wellbeing game.

Sandie and Marguerite’s Challenge/information:

See our slides and handout for details of our games. We’d like to challenge delegates who didn’t get to play our student-created games to have a go at them! We’d love to get some more feedback for the students who helped us to put our presentation together.

Parallel Sessions 2

3. Curiouser and Curiouser (30 mins)
Samantha Clarke, Mike Duncan, Sylvester Arnab

A case study and discussion of the use of curiosity and play in a Sports Science Masters Programme. Oh, and Mystery Packages…

33. A Completely Inconspicuous and Normal Human Playtest (30 mins)
■■■■■ ■■■■, ■■■■■■ ■■■■■

This session is a brief playtest of an educational game.*

*Length of session not guaranteed. Nature/existence of game not confirmed. We accept no legal and/or philosophical responsibility for play which may occur during the rest of the conference as a result of this experime… we mean PLAYTEST, yes… Playtest 💀

John and Ashley’s Challenge/information:

The mysterious leader of this session turned out to be a benevolent but mischievous ghost (Captain Brooks), who was controlling John Lean and Ashley Darrow. They provided the following challenge:

There were two themes behind our session – how to stretch the boundaries of play and how to give instructions in different ways. Based on this, we’d like to offer the following challenges:

– Try to undermine traditional classroom power relationships by presenting information and instructions in an unconventional way. What if nobody knew you were the one in charge?

– Try to encourage the spread of play out of your sessions. What can you do to get those who aren’t directly involved playing?

Also a philosophical question (of course):

– How do you know you haven’t already been set a challenge? 

22. Playful assessment in first aid using escape room principles (60 mins)
Nathalie Charlier, Bob Van de Putte, Elke Van den Brande, Inge Vermuyten, Jos Luyten, Lien Van Der Stock, Tina Vertommen

In this workshop, we will simulate a summative assessment procedure using escape room puzzles to assess university students’ competencies in first aid. Following the game play, we will initiate a discussion about the challenges of content-based escape room design and its integration in summative assessment.

1. Playful Interactions, Games, and the Student Experience (60 mins)
Andrew Walsh, Jessica Haigh.

Enabling playful interactions with information sources during teaching to enable critical engagement with these sources through the use of Lego, collage, and more. Attendees will see some examples of our playful teaching and the reasoning that lies behind them.

Parallel Sessions 3

21. Dewey Dice – a serendipitously inspiring RPG (60 mins)
Alan Turner

Using  3 x d10, and the dewey decimal system, create your own personal hero including weakness and specialism, while also creating a quest for your rivals to win loot or receive pity. Understand how the dewey decimal system can develop creative thinking and idea generation.

18. The Locked Room and other stories (90 mins)
Liz Cable

Three case studies demonstrating how escape games can be used with undergraduates for the purposes of recruiting, teaching, or assessment. Examples are drawn from Accounting, English, Journalism and Criminology courses. You will learn and practice three methods to make a puzzle out of any topic, and know how to introduce them to your classroom.

36. Using Lego Serious Play to Create Communities of Practise (90 mins)
Alison Grieve, Leigh Morland, Ellen Johannsen

Experience building a community based on shared talents, strengths and knowledge and create a possible future if you continued to work together and support each other. All this and fun through Lego Serious Play. It really is about building communities of practise.

Parallel Sessions 4

37. Literacies through game creation – the Game Jam format (90 mins)
Stephanie (Charlie) Farley, Eva Murzyn

Be led through the creating, licensing, and sharing of a board game as an Open Educational Resource with this hands-on workshop. Then discuss our study on how Game Jams are being used at The University of Edinburgh to engage in copyright, licensing, digital literacy, and the benefits of playful learning.

41. The Effectiveness of Game-Based Learning (90 mins)
Simon Grey

Do you like potatoes? Do you like pirates? In this session participants will help us determine how effective game based learning is. Participants will learn coding with “Potato Pirates” or source control with “Check It Out”.

42. Puzzle Jam (90 mins)
Matthew Crossley

The process of puzzle design is analogous to both curriculum design, and assessment design. This session aims to explore that analogy through a “mini jam”, exploring the practice of puzzle design using both analogue and digital tools, and reflecting on what better puzzle design can teach us.

Parallel Sessions 5

43. PASS – the border crossing game (30 mins)
Carolina Islas, Mikko Vinni

Information related to the travelers’ requirements to cross the Schengen Borders is available online and in a form of brochures. However, this does not imply that travellers are reading or understanding this information. The card game PASS, developed during the BODEGA project (http://bodega-project.eu/>), aims to trigger the individual’s playfulness while raising curiosity on this topic.

19. Curious considerations (60 mins)
Rebecca Thomas

Can a non-utilitarian method such as play generate practical ideas for learning and teaching? In an attempt to actively trigger curiosity in the participants those involved will make small objects from found materials, following which we will examine how creativity and curiosity are powerful learning strategies within teaching and learning.

39. Playful Professional Development (60 mins)
Amanda Hardy

Come and engage with our playful CPD initiatives! Swap and create trading cards and 3D paper objects, try out a learning design card deck, or have a go at a non-standard CPD session task. 30 min to free-play and 30 min to review using another in-development tool, a card game to structure feedback on ideas.

Parallel Sessions 6

6. How to Fail Your Research Degree (90 mins)
Daisy Abbott

How to Fail Your Research Degree is a free educational game which teaches postgraduate research skills. It focusses on humour and fictional academic disasters to make learning memorable. Come and play the game for yourself, get ideas for implementing it with students, and contribute to future adaptations.

Daisy’s Challenges/information:

1.       If you missed the session, visit the website http://howtofailyourresearchdegree.com/ and watch the video, it’ll make you giggle. If the game looks suitable for your students or colleagues, all the instructions for how to get the game (for free, or print on demand) are there.

2.       Follow me on twitter @DAbbottResearch to be the first to hear about a new games-based approach to teaching students how to undertake a literature review. It’s called On the Shoulders of Giants and will be available very soon.

3.       Research skills are hard to teach (well). If you’ve taught them you know, if not, the literature tells us so (Ryan et al., 2013, p.88). So here’s a challenge: what other important but elusive research skill would benefit from a GBL approach? Tell me!

4.       During Liz Cable’s excellent session on puzzle rooms for learning, my table developed an activity to teach the basics of citation and referencing. Who wants to help me finish it and/or test it? Get in touch.

24. Spatial Negotiations – playing with nonhuman intelligence (60 mins)
Heather Barnett, Emma Ribbing

Spatial Negotiations is an immersive exploration of collective cognition and communication, taking inspiration from an intelligent single-celled organism, the slime mould, Physarum polycephalum. Through a series of experiments and improvisations participants will operate as a human supercell, devising forms of collective intelligence and non-hierarchical knowledge systems.

31. Stepping away from the screen – Analog Games Design in Digital Games Design Courses (60 mins)
Nia Wearn, Esther MacCallum-Stewart

You would think that having a distinct analogue game design module as part of a computer games design course would be a common occurrence – turns out it isn’t. We have one at Staffordshire University and I’d love to show you what kind of games the students have made.

Parallel Sessions 7

27. Winning at Your Game of Life with The Play Mindset (60 mins)
Portia Tung

Unleash your play brain with The Play Mindset, a model and an interactive process for transforming the way you play your game of Life. Join us on a play test adventure where you will get to explore and further one of four dimensions for growing your Play Mindset to propel you towards a Big Hairy Audacious Goal!

10. Survival of the Funnest (90 mins)
John Dixon, David Parker

In this session you will provide the foundation for agent-based optimisation algorithms to create a game by selecting mechanics based upon fun. You will playtest a game, suggest adaptions and give your view on fun with the goal of creating the playful learning conference’s first print-and-play game.

Parallel Sessions 8

7. International Games Week – How to build a structure for gaming? (30 mins)
Darren Edwards

The American Library Association’s International Games Week has supported games and play in libraries across the globe since 2007. This library craft workshop will give a brief history of the initiative and allow participants to prototype structures to support IGW in the UK from coloured card and Pritt-Stick.

13. Exploration of the value of a ‘playful’ approach to laboratory science practical classes (30 mins)
Andrew Folkard

This session will explore taking a playful learning approach to laboratory science practical classes. I will invite delegates to reproduce a simple lab class I ran this year, and to use this to develop discussion of the value of didactic vs. playful approaches in this context.

Andrew’s Challenge/information:

Andrew has issued a challenge for anyone involved in laboratory teaching, and also a mission for anyone to add subliminal pirate images to their slides: see full details and instructions at this link.

29. “And the Survey Says” – Using gamification and active learning to enhance didactic lectures (60 mins)
Tom Jolley

This session looks at using the concept of the quiz show Family Fortunes to gamify a lecture based session. You will have a chance to see the game in action, learn how it was made and discuss some ideas of how you might use the approach in your context.

Tom’s Challenge/information:

My thoughts: It was great given i’ve not presented too much at external conferences to be welcomed by such a supportive (and forgiving) audience. The session wasn’t 100% in terms of technical timing but I was met with patience and a collective sense of humour about the fact it hasn’t gone completely to plan. The playful nature took away all the anxiety of presenting. I had some fantastic positive feedback about the game itself but also the presentation supporting it, which I appreciate and has helped grow my confidence to do something a little different.

Challenge: A few people have said they would like to use this format in their own contexts. So my challenge is to go for it. I have made the materials available here <https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dowvv_GrDZog-OQvPJXQyjezOTdOlnR_?usp=sharing>. A small request is that if you do use it, please share how you have used it by completing this form. My hope is it gets used in a number of institutions and we find that there is a wide range of ways it can be used.

44. Tiny Epic Battles: for what purpose? (60 mins)
Ellen Johannsen, Alex Moseley

Tiny Epic Battles is a fast-paced storytelling game that leads up to an epic good vs evil showdown (featuring pixellated mega-super-heroes). Originally designed to test the effectiveness of different sized teams, from 2 to 16, we believe that the game could be used as a heuristic for other learning contexts. In the workshop we’ll play the original game, and then design learning layers to place on top, and test their playability together.

Parallel Sessions 9

14. The A-Lab: A Playful Circle (60 mins)
Becky Shelley, Natalie Brown

Through a fun, engaging workshop participants will explore their assumptions about playful learning and learning outcomes. The presenters will share with participants the research underway at the A-Lab in Tasmania, Australia and use/create artefacts that engage participants in thinking about the opportunities and barriers to playfully learning with new technologies.

16. Libopoly: explore playful learning’s place in staff training and development (60 mins)
Steve Gray, Cheryl Coveney, Hilary Johnson

Libopoly is the answer to the oft-asked question ‘What’s it like to be a Learning and Teaching Librarian at the Open University?’ Come and find out by exploring this version of a familiar board game. It even includes Lego! (What’s not to like?)