Programme

Programme 2022

The sessions that took place at Playful Learning 2022 are listed below. Over the summer, these will be augmented with resources, challenges and activities related to the sessions, so that you can carry on the thinking and learning long after the conference.

Look out for the inset activity boxes.

See also our extended Thursday Evening Sessions, and other activities that went on throughout the conference on our activities page.

Short Abstracts

Parallel Sessions 1

6. Playing the Exquisite Corpse: Podcast, Teaching and Learning.  (60 minutes)
Beatriz Acevedo; Andrew Middleton
How to create a space for meaningful, authentic and exquisite conversations through the exquisite corpse game.  

Activity / Challenge:

• Our challenge: taking the structure from a familiar childhood game or parlour game, devise an inviting conversational framework you can use with your students (and share the results at next year’s Playful Learning Conference)!
• Listen to the Exquisite Education podcast: https://exquisiteeducation.podbean.com/

8. Boxing/Unboxing Dialogues on Boundary-Crossing Playful Learning in Higher Education with DIY Bento Lunch Boxes (30 minutes)
Kim Holflod
This interactive session aims to ‘unbox’ results from a Design-Based Research study situated across Danish teacher education and social education on playful boundary-crossing collaboration. Meanwhile, the participants fold their own DIY Bento lunch boxes and fill them with perspectives and ideas on playful learning across boundaries and in higher education.

15. Bringing a bit of Skyrim into workplace competence development (60 minutes)
Scott Wilson
What can Skyrim and Assassin’s Creed teach us about how to manage competencies in the workplace? We tried out a new approach to skills for our company based on our experience of gaming with some pretty amazing results, and in this workshop you can try it out and see if you can adapt it for your own use too.

48. Sustainability & the Evil Wizard (30 minutes)
Sian Joel-Edgar; Soum Chowdhury; Lauren Traczykowski
“You are standing in the cavern of the evil wizard.” Non-linear story-telling games like this one from Big (1988) are fun and intellectually challenging. We will play an online non-linear game built around the Sustainable Development Goals (with specific reference to wellbeing) and deliver a TWINE software tutorial to develop your own game.

50. University World – Board Game (60 minutes)
Maarten Koeners, Christopher Jeansonne
We will playtest a board game that aims to increase players’ understanding and awareness of the range of university experiences. Using situational dialogue and question prompts, this game aims to support students’ transition to university as they share, deliberate, and reflect on diverse university experiences through guided persona-based roleplay activities.

Parallel Sessions 2

5. From digital games to playful, physical and social learning activities: Experience and experiment with a play activity wheel (60 minutes)
Vici Daphne Händel
Anyone interested in framing a pedagogical activity where computer games universes are used as an inspiration to create a playful, physical and social learning activity can benefit from participating in this workshop. This workshop will introduce the Play activity wheel, a pedagogical tool that inspire to a playful approach to learning. 

13.Serious Stickle Bricks (60 minutes)
Roger Saunders
Participate in a group activity requiring negotiation, planning, quality control and supply chain using Stickle Bricks.

Activity / Challenge:

Would any attendees and presenters be interested in sharing ideas, activities and thoughts via my podcast, the L&T Chat Show. If anyone is interested then they can contact me on this email roger.saunders@dmu.ac.uk. Recordings will take place from September for release over the 22/23 academic year. This would also provide an opportunity for people who try something new out to have a chance to talk about how it went. 

23. Making “anatomy fun and interesting”: in-person and online crafting for learning anatomy (60 minutes)
Claire Timmins
This session will present a variety of different crafting activities that can enhance the learning of anatomical structures involved in speech production. Participants will be able to create their own anatomical models both off- and on-line (using paper and Minecraft Education).

Session 32 (previously in this slot) has been withdrawn.

52. “University Challenges”: Addressing Transition through Games-Based Learning  (60 minutes)
Natalia Gerodetti; Darren Nixon
In this session we play ‘University Challenges’, a game designed through a student-staff collaboration with students at Leeds Beckett University that addresses the transitional issues students have identified in a board game. 

Parallel Sessions 3

34. Catastrophic Learning: making games to understand how small things affect big things (90 minutes)
Pen Holland
Learn to play Catastrophic, a card game that makes connections between small scale processes and large scale events in biology, then use templates and reflection to start designing your own expansion pack/bespoke version. Insights from the staff-student partnership development process, and student learning and engagement in person and online, will also be shared.

35. Planning a Hero’s Journey (90 minutes)
Alke Groppel-Wegener; Robert Farmer
Ever wanted to plan a session as a journey, but didn’t quite know where to start? This interactive workshop will introduce you to some basics of experience design, and then participants will design a self-guided walk based on the Hero’s Journey in education for the rest of the conference delegates.

Activity / Challenge:

1. Take a look at our ‘Calling Students to Adventure’ website: https://mypad.northampton.ac.uk/hero/
   This contains an outline of the hero’s journey, along with diagnostic questions which will be of help when planning your own courses and/or modules.

2. One of the most difficult things when planning an educational hero’s journey is deciding how best to motivate students to accept the call to adventure.
   Take a look at the questions on this Padlet – https://uon1.padlet.org/robert_farmer3/hero_playful_learning_2022 – and add your responses.

36. Family Business Tapestry as Dialogic Playspaces in Family Business Learning (90 minutes)
Ed Gonsalves; Ricardo Zamora
The family business tapestry workshop draws on traditions of serious play (Rieber, 2001) to operationalise family businesses as paradox (Statler et al., 2011). It belongs to a portfolio of playful objects developed for training entrepreneurial executives using play (Gonsalves and Zamora, 2017) that is derived from activity theory (Vygotsky, 1967) 

Parallel Sessions 4

1. Making tests fun (60 minutes)
Roger Saunders
Take part in a fun session using a range of quiz and game show formats. All ideas are easy to implement and will help to create a real buzz in the classroom as well as providing useful feedback for both students and teachers.

Activity / Challenge:

Would any attendees and presenters be interested in sharing ideas, activities and thoughts via my podcast, the L&T Chat Show. If anyone is interested then they can contact me on this email roger.saunders @ dmu.ac.uk. Recordings will take place from September for release over the 22/23 academic year. This would also provide an opportunity for people who try something new out to have a chance to talk about how it went. 

20. Bought in or scared off? Exploring playful approaches to staff induction (30 minutes)
Malcolm Murray
Learn about, try out and suggest improvements for some of the playful online induction approaches used to bring a growing team together when everyone was working remotely. You might find yourself unconscious in Dominic Cummings’ old night club or wrestling with pirate treasure maps. Presentation will involve ducks.

49. Let me tell you a story: Narrative approaches to learning using Twine (60 minutes)
Nick Feather
A practical, storytelling approach to learning. This session will actively demonstrate how use of narratives within a teaching setting can increase engagement and understanding. Specifically, we shall use ‘choose your own adventure’ software to develop games within areas of individual practice and even design the poster!

54. Padlocks, the web and AR: three modes for designing and playing educational escape rooms (60 minutes)
Luca Botturi & Masiar Babazadeh
In this session, participants will test the same escape room in three different modalities: (a) physical padlocks and gears, (b) web-based, and (c) Augmented Reality. We will then discuss the advantages and drawbacks of each game modality, and how to blend them, considering design, gameplay experience, and usability.

Parallel Sessions 5

14. Making memes: creating memes to develop conceptual understanding (30 minutes)
John Parkin
In this interactive workshop, we will use a free website to create memes.  We will consider how using this visual literacy approach can be a playful way of engaging students to develop their understanding of concepts using the Meme Generator website.

Activity / Challenge

Thank you to everybody who came to my meme session.  If you enjoyed making a meme, you might wish to explore how you can make your own GIF and consider how to use this in your teaching. The website we used, ImgFlip, also lets you make a GIF.  To have a go at GIF making, please go to this ImgFlip website.  You can find instructions at the bottom of the page.

26. Let’s design a playful museum: Lessons learned with the Comicubes (30 minutes)
Katriina Heljakka
This presentation highlights observations made during a course for university students, where the aim was to design a concept and prototype the physical space for a Playful Museum. The course employed Comicubes—a tangible physical tool that allows three-dimensional manipulation and affords various forms of playful interaction for group work. 

43. Wanted for Crimes against Accessibility! (60 minutes)
Helen Ghodbane; Shannon Caruana
A 1-hour escape room activity, where participants will work in groups, engaging in an interactive learning experience to solve puzzles, defuse the time bomb and stop the evil Dr NoAccess. This activity will showcase the flexible uses of Padlet as an interactive online tool for staff and student collaboration, gamification, content creation.

45. Ludic practice: play in university museums (60 minutes)
Sarah Campbell
How do you make university museum collections relevant to contemporary art and design students? One strategy used by Central Saint Martins Museum & Study Collection is ‘ludic practice’, using play to encourage students to see museums as relevant to their practice and as places for creative engagement not just historical study. Find out about how the collection uses play and play some games with museum objects yourself.

53. Herman Says: Pedagogical Puppetry and Performative Play (30 minutes)
Benjamin Hall; Ian Truelove
This workshop / paper presents Herman, the unofficial and unexpected mascot of independent learning who dares students and staff to embrace performative and unconventional approaches to creative practice.

Parallel Sessions 6

9. Using Playmobil.pro with learners (60 minutes)
Karl McCormack; Carol Southall
This workshop explores how using Playmobil in teaching can allow learners to be more relaxed, elicit candid dialogue and gain great insight. The session will demonstrate an example of use in new student inductions. Further examples will be shared as part of a discussions around using Playmobil in your teaching.

18. Don’t get caught in the Publishing Trap: a demonstration of the latest iteration of the internationally renowned scholarly comms and copyright board game (60 minutes)
Jane Secker; Chris Morrison
The Publishing Trap is aimed at early career researchers. It was released as an open educational resource and influenced creation of a range of other games. The pandemic led us to adapt our boardgame to be taught online in a virtual classroom, using an interactive powerpoint and break-out rooms. In this workshop you will have a chance to play the first part of the game.

44. The Accessible Escape Room (60 minutes)
Ross Parker, Malcolm Murray, Rachelle O’Brien, Paul Finley, and Nic Fern
The Accessible Escape Room is a take on common escape room dynamics through the lens of universal design and inclusion.

Parallel Sessions 7

10. Escape Rooms and how to Develope one Online (90 minutes)
Julie Mulvey; Robin Watson
An introduction to Escape Room design and development including activities to build an escape room workflow design and translate this into an online escape room using Google Docs

17. Discovering AI through fiction (90 minutes)
Andrew Cox; Neil Dixon
Invent your own chatbot character to help you in the classroom and complete a story about the future use of a chatbots in learning. This workshop will draw on the techniques and resources of fiction writing to increase your understanding of artificial intelligence and its responsible use in higher education. Responses from the session will be used for research purposes (participants will be able to opt in or out of this). 

24. YOUTHOPIAS – Youth Organising through Playful & Participatory Internationalised Action research & Systems literacy (90 minutes)
Luca Morini
We invite you to join the ongoing development of the YOUTHOPIAS approach, which organically links the “three missions” of Universities. The workshop leverages playful techniques and philosophies to provide a blueprint for internationalised Higher Education and youth engagement under the umbrella concepts of planetary citizenship, complexity theory and systems literacy. 

55. Puzzle Workshop for Educational Escape Rooms (90 minutes)
Bernd Remmele; Daniel Aranda; Jordi Sánchez-Navarro; Whitton, Nicola; Mulvey, Julie; Remmele, Bernd; Kern, Annette; Botturi, Luca; Babazadeh, Masiar; Pelliccioni, Sergio; Iaffaldano, Milena; Hoyne, Seamus, Guenther Seeber
Puzzle workshop for creating educational escape rooms. This workshop is part of a set of guidelines for educators developed by the European Project ‘School Break’ that also creates educational escape rooms itself.

Parallel Sessions 8

7. Creative Thinking Quest:  What happens when you present learning as a Choose Your Own Adventure? (30 minutes)
Daisy Abbott
Form an adventuring party and Choose Your Own Adventure through a playful way to teach research skills. Using the Creative Thinking Quest and its usage data as inspiration, we will riff, write, and even fight about issues such as personalisation, novelty, narratives, exploration, and gamification in Higher Education.

Activity / Challenge:

Choose Your Own Adv -Challenge!

Option 1: Fighter (15 – 30 mins)

Conquer at least one chapter of the Creative Thinking Quest: https://daisyabbottitchio.itch.io/creative-thinking-quest

Give me your thoughts in the evaluation survey: https://gsa-surveys.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/creative-thinking-quest-evaluation

Option 2: Bard (1-10 mins)

Come up with an advertising slogan to encourage people to play the Creative Thinking Quest! Tweet it and tag me @DAbbottResearch

16. Wanted for Crimes Against Accessibility! (60 minutes)
Helen Ghodbane
A 1-hour escape room activity, where participants will work in groups, engaging in an interactive learning experience to solve puzzles, defuse the time bomb and stop the evil Dr NoAccess. This activity will use Padlet as a platform and consider accessibility of tools for creating digital puzzles and games.

21. Media at Play: Board Games in Media Studies Classrooms (60 minutes)
Christopher Jeansonne
Using lesson examples, student responses, and paratextual board game/media pairings, we’ll explore how board games can help bend the bars of the hermeneutic cage found in many media classrooms, broadening students’ understanding of popular media texts as interactive systems.

25. The power of imagination to promote eco-awareness (30 minutes)
Anne Lise Nordbø
Anne Lise Nordbø is a Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at the University of South-Eastern Norway, Department of Visual and Performing Arts Education. Teaching Early Childhood education students, she applies playful drama in multidisciplinary subjects, as well as applying arts-based methods in her research studies.   

41. Quest not Questionnaire: Improving Accessibility Skills (60 minutes)
Katie Piatt; George Robinson; Jill Shacklock
Is there a secret message in your image ALT Text? Come and try our Accessibility Quest to think about engaging ways of improving digital skills through puzzles and challenges.

Parallel Sessions 9

19. Using Gather to create playful environments for social learning online  (60 minutes)
Mia O’Hara; Karen Poole; Owen Proctor-Jackson
At King’s College London the Library have been using Gather to encourage social learning online. Come and find out how to how anyone can make a fun little 64-bit digital world  to put students at their ease and get them engaging with our teaching librarians.

38. Building Playful (Educational) Leadership Models (60 minutes)
Andrew Walsh; Rosie Jones
In this workshop we will start developing playful leadership models. We will briefly introduce some leadership models and ask attendees to consider the important components of a new, playful, (educational) leadership model. Using a range of materials, words, and objects, attendees will build a bagful of meaningful elements to share.

Activity / Challenge:

Playful Leadership is about enabling playfulness in others, helping to grow a culture where people feel able to play. With that in mind, how could you help your team be more playful? What action could you take that makes it feel safer for play to emerge?

40. Histo-Link Card Game (60 minutes)
Frankie MacMillan; Zoe Palmer 
Test and improve your knowledge of the structure and function of mammalian tissues by playing Histo-Link, a newly developed card game. The game is played by 4-6 players. A basic knowledge of biology would be useful but don’t worry, the game can be played competitively, collaboratively or in teams. 

31. Game Design as Playful Learning in the Second Language Classoom (30 minutes)
Sebastien Dubreil
In a mixed-level French course, students played and critiqued French boardgames to examine them as cultural objects and leveraged their potential for language and culture learning. Learners then designed their own French-learning games. Designing games became, in and of itself, a game, that is to say “a problem-solving activity approached with a playful attitude.”

Parallel Sessions 10

28. Playing Our Way Into Compassionate Learning Communities (60 minutes)
Deepti Kharod; Sandra L. Guzman-Foster
Playful experiences combined with a framework of compassion help adult learners to explore challenging topics and to build bridges across difference. This session invites you to discover and discuss the combined power of these pedagogical approaches by engaging in playful and compassionate activities such as dance, contemplation, and interviewing.

46. Starting a playful rebellion – the story so far… (60 minutes)
Emma Gillaspy
Not so long ago in a galaxy just up the M6…We share the struggles and successes of our story in developing a playful educational movement. We explore approaches to developing playful communities via an adventure trail leading you through the stages of creating your own playful rebel alliance.

51. No more talking heads! – A playful approach to video and media creation in education and academia.  (60 minutes)
Stephan Caspar
This workshop will attempt to add colour to brighten up the beige-ness of educational video. Exploring playful approaches to content creation, we will focus on showing rather than telling, employing ideas to engage, educate and entertain, with tips and tricks gleamed from programme-makers and creators to ensure content is accessible and useful. 

Activity/Challenge:

Read our paper A framework for re-imagining video in Higher Education using playfulness published in the Journal of Play in Adulthood and use this padlet (https://padlet.com/scaspar/playfulvideo) to share examples of videos that you’ve seen or that you’ve created that can be used for teaching and learning, or for telling stories about research. If you want me work with your team or run a version of this workshop on the use of video in education, then email me stephancaspar @ cmu.edu

Parallel Sessions 11

2. When comedy met coaching (60 minutes)
Claire Ashworth
Join me for some purposeful play where we use silly storytelling and memory games to develop some practical coaching skills. The workshop will draw on skills as we have fun and aims to demonstrate no tools required. An innovative and inclusive approach to learning and developing skills in the classroom.

22. University World – Board Game (60 minutes)
Maarten Koeners, Christopher Jeansonne
We will playtest a board game that aims to increase players’ understanding and awareness of the range of university experiences. Using situational dialogue and question prompts, this game aims to support students’ transition to university as they share, deliberate, and reflect on diverse university experiences through guided persona-based roleplay activities.

29. When is an escape room not an escape room? When it’s a…. (60 minutes)
Liz Cable
Commercial Escape Rooms are not the best models for educational escape room games. When we want to get players thinking about issues of social justice, sometimes we need to challenge our own assumptions about how learning games are made and played.