Author: Katie Piatt

Summary by Katie Piatt and Helen Sykes

Last week saw our first online event focussing on Playful approaches to Remote Teaching and Working – Online Event. We set it up as a ‘drop in when you want’ day, but we had a steady 18-22 participants throughout the day.

The first session, hosted by Katie Piatt, explored different experiences with playful work and learning. We talked about the range of functionality in Blackboard Collaborate (noting differences between Zoom, Teams etc) and testing how playful we could be with introductions in the whiteboard and emojis in the chat. Although we did discover how easily one person could delete the whole screen with the eraser – oops!

Attendees shared examples of activities and brainstormed ideas:

Adding interactivity to online meetings and teaching sessions was a key theme. One way to achieve this is the use of impromptu polls, which is a feature of most conferencing software.

The full set of ideas captured during the morning session was recorded in Padlet: Read all the ideas!

The formal sessions were interspersed with multi-player online games to allow group discussions in a more informal context, such as ‘Code Names‘. There are lots of great games at https://netgames.io/games/ to explore and play for free online.

Alex Moseley led us through a series of engaging challenges demonstrating interactive activities that can be run as part of online teaching. These included creative use of objects as an induction activity, storytelling for group bonding and skills design activities.

The day ended with a fabulous afternoon quiz from Daisy Abbott, featuring a photo round, a music round and our attempts to survive the apocalypse through foraging.

Attendees could complete some of the rounds by running around the house looking for objects – or, to ensure accessibility, choose to complete a Haiku instead.

Thank you to everyone who attended and contributed – we’ve already been asked when the next one will be! So watch this space and we’ll plan something for September.

Let’s Get Together! Coming up in June is our first #PLA online event ‘Playful Approaches to Remote Teaching and Working’ event.

The event will be held using Blackboard Collaborate on Friday June 26th, with one room open for the day for you to drop in and out as you wish. Prepare to share your failures and successes for playful Working and Teaching – or just join in the games and quiz! Find our more.

Meet Alex! Our featured member for June is our very own #PLA co-chair Alex Moseley.

For our May Playful Challenges  we released 3 activities – and here are our favourite results (click each image to enlarge – highlight to see the answer)!

Challenge 1 – AnswerSmash

Challenge 2 – Product Smash

And finally – something to read this month: Journal of Imaginary Research

Stay safe, playful folks – and see many of you online on the 26th, we hope!

Katie & Alex x

Each month we will introduce a PLA member through 5 photos telling their Playful Learning journey. This month, we introduce you to…

Alex Moseley in his own words: Co-chair of the PLA (and one of the Founding 8, which sounds a bit Lord of the Rings). He pretends to have a serious job as Head of Curriculum Enhancement at the University of Leicester, but in reality he accidentally finds himself playing and creating games in all areas where adults and learning meet. He also aims to stop talking about himself in the third person.

This first image reminds me that games existed long before Atari, and those based on simple yet powerful ideas are still played today, thousands of years on (Chess, for example). This is a more recent example I found on a museum visit, but it was the cultural storytelling gameplay that stood out for me, particularly as you read on:

“The game is played by throwing the stick up in the air and catching it in one of the holes, sometimes with eyes closed… Every time you miss a hole, your face [is] marked with soot; if your opponent misses, they come back to life. Typical moves may be: I kill you, I cut off your legs… I remove your entrails, I feed them to my dogs, the dogs excrete your entrails, the excreta are eaten by a fox, the fox’s excreta are eaten by a polar bear… The game is over when a player’s excreta are dispersed by the wind and fall as snow”.
[SPRI Museum Y: 2011/79/3]

The lower right of the picture shows a game I created for a museum conference, Curate-a-Fact. The top right shows my original designs for the cards, with colours, shapes and points. This process, and the resulting game, were my first lesson in ‘simplicity’: reducing a context and game design down to the simplest yet most important elements. Several playtests removed the shapes, points and many rules, and the final game uses three simple devices: a time limit, colours to help mix the groups, and communal storytelling.

This is the pinnacle of ‘reducing to simplicity’. Over four months in 2017/18, Nic Whitton and I went through many different ideas for a conference game for Playful Learning 2018. It got to a point as the conference neared where we had pages of notes, special rules, points and reward systems – and we just stopped in frustration, had a beer, and threw it all away: just retaining this simple pirate die with six suggestive icons. We then left it to the attendees and presenters to do with it what they wanted, and it worked a treat.

Carrying on the theme of simplicity, this picture was taken in the middle of an afternoon of deep strategic thinking at my University. Not by our senior managers (although one joined in) but by students and staff from different levels and departments. We wanted to understand what ‘belonging’ meant to us as a community, so I invited this group together to explore agents for and barriers against belonging. They developed a set of ‘simple guiding principles’ that we’ve used to guide many of our institutional approaches since. For example:

SGP5: Will we (staff and students) feel proud of this?

And to finish, what better than a picture of 24 apparently normal people meeting under a desk? If you want to know more, head here. But I think this sums up everything that’s good in play for me: give a group of adults a meaningful challenge and the right conditions for play, and their creativity for any endeavour is unbounded.

Thanks for sharing your story and your photos Alex.

If you are unlucky, you might be selected as next month’s sacrifice chosen member – we will be in touch!

An online PLA event focussed on ‘Playful approaches to Remote Teaching and Working’ will be held on Friday June 26th.

This will be a day-long online event where you can dip in and out of sessions as you wish. Rather than presentations, there will be facilitated sessions on topics where you can bring along your own examples for sharing and discuss and test ideas. There will also be games and challenges to get involved with.

No booking required – a Blackboard Collaborate link will be emailed in advance.

Programme – drop in and out of sessions as you wish

9:30 – 10:30 Playful Working – facilitated sharing and discussion (Facilitated by Katie)

Please bring along examples of what has gone well and what has gone wrong for sharing eg a screenshot or screen-sharing.

10:45 – 11:30 Game 1 – “Love Letter” Free and online

11:45 – 12:45 Playful Teaching Challenge (Facilitated by Alex)

1:30 – 2:30 Game 2 – “One Night Ultimate Werewolf” Free and online

2:30 – 3:30 Friday Afternoon Quiz (hosted by Daisy Abbott) and close

See you all there – no booking required, just drop in!

Your April Playful Challenge was to create and share a photos of your ‘Working at Home’ Assistants – and here are some of the results!

For your May challenge, there will be a weekly task posted each Wednesday on Twitter alternated by your co-chairs Katie and Alex. Follow the hashtag to play.

Our May Featured member is Alison James with her story of how LEGO shaped her career.

Playful Learning Conference: with regret, we have taken the difficult decision to postpone the PL20 conference in Leicester this year. We will be back though, better than ever, delivering the PL20 conference (with keynotes and sessions as planned) on July 14-16^th, 2021! See http://conference.playthinklearn.net/blog/ for full details.

2020 Playful Learning Association meet-up SAVE THE DATE: An online PLA event focussed on ‘Playful approaches to Remote Teaching and Working’ will be held on Friday June 26th. This will be a day-long online event where you can dip in and out of sessions as you wish. Rather than presentations, there will be facilitated sessions on topics where you can bring along your own examples for sharing and discuss and test ideas. There will also be games and challenges to get involved with. Keep an eye on this page for the programme and latest news.

Something to watch: Mufti Games

Stay safe playful folks – and see you in June!

Katie & Alex x

Each month we will introduce a PLA member through 5 photos telling their Playful Learning journey. This month, we introduce you to…

Alison James: Professor Emerita, University of Winchester. Researching the use of play in higher education, particularly in relation to the teaching of management concepts and theories.

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As a child I lived almost permanently in another world, complete with imaginary friends and alter ego. Looking back I realise I first encountered Czikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow on a beach in Sussex…(hairstyle hasn’t improved much)…

I never grew out of building with LEGO®,  just from 2009 it,  and the LEGO® Serious Play®  method, became a touchstone of teaching and learning for me. Designed anything from personal development planning courses, curriculum design sessions, ‘stuckness’ workshops with my colleague Graham, conference activities and all sorts.

One of my great joys with play was inventing and co-convening the Play and Creativity Festival at the University of Winchester which ran for three years, including two festivals in a magical Play Tent. This opened my eyes wide to the diverse forms of play that are going on underneath our (institutional) eyes which we may not be widely aware of, or appreciate.

I’m fascinated by the different kinds of imaginative and playful teaching that teachers invent. Forty-odd (hyphen is important here) examples are published in The Power of Play in HE: Creativity in Tertiary Learning, which I co-wrote andedited with Dr Chrissi Nerantzi. Among many things, they give the lie to the old chestnut that play is *just*for arty/sporty types.

I’m now a few months (and elbows deep) into funded research exploring the value of play in HE. Already the opening survey and interviews (not, alas, planned playworkshops ,due to present global circs) are revealing powerful messages about educator passion, purpose, practice, values and beliefs concerning play which extend far beyond the pedagogic. You can see an aspect of this in my webinar Play as Survival for Dale Sidebottom; he’s a super dynamic sports coach and play fan in Australia who runs Energetic Education and jugarlife.

(Don’t click play. It won’t. I know. The irony)

I’ve been incredibly grateful to have been invited to speak at so many fabulous events to support play, creativity, imagination and innovation in HE. This was from the Abertay L&T conference in 2018, colleagues rocking our Dundee sunglasses with Alastair Robertson and. Who says play doesn’t belong in HE?

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Thanks for sharing your story and your photos Alison.

If you are unlucky, you might be selected as next month’s sacrifice chosen member – we will be in touch!

We all need an extra dose of playfulness at the moment – welcome to your April round-up, here to encourage a playful attitude for your new daily lives.

First up, the monthly member profile: Introducing James Charnock, everybody’s favourite conference organiser/singer/procrastinator [Editor: seriously – I had to chase this man a lot!]

Playful Challenge Time!
In case you’ve spent all month wondering, here are the answers to the March emoji challenge:

1. 👧👧👧👧👧 = Little Women (featuring the March family)
2. 👣🐧🐧 = March of the Penguins
3. 🤫🏠❷ = The Quiet Place 2 (opened this March)

And for your April Playful Challenge we would like you to create and share a photos of your ‘Working at Home’ Assistants – pets, family or inanimate objects posed at your workspace…your co-chairs Katie and Alex share theirs to inspire you:

Share your photos on Twitter with #PlayLearn and we’ll include them in next month’s round-up!

Are you in Playful Isolation? As most of us are being asked to stay at home, we thought it was time to think about how play could help us to cope with distance, isolation and unusual situations. We started this blog post, but we’d love to hear your ideas – add them in the comments!

Playful Learning Conference – We are continuing with plans to run PL20 on 8-10th July, with a further decision being made in mid-June. Full update on the conference site.

What’s going on with you? This round-up comes out during the first week of each month. If there is any playful activity/event/book/idea you’d like to share with members in May, then email Katie Piatt or tweet #PlayLearn and we’ll include it!

Take care of yourselves and may your April be playful x

Each month we will introduce a PLA member through 5 photos telling their Playful Learning journey. This month, we introduce you to…

James Charnock in his own words: a conference and event organiser for Manchester Met Uni currently in lockdown in Withington. I am painfully disorganised, capable of incredible procrastination and fascinated with virtually everything (but trying to whittle it down to experiential events, hybrid events and how to engage the lost delegate).

At the moment, I’m also doing a mean line in home schooling (teaching my kids poker), reassessing traditional work wear (conducting online meetings in fancy dress) and if this thing carries on much longer, I may even learn to play the guitar properly…

This is me, and everyone else at the end of Playful Learning 2017. I tried to find a picture of us at the end of the first one in 2016, but actually, I think it was 2017 that I really got the idea of what PL was about, and it’s this utterly wonderful group of people who helped me get there. They’ve changed my life.

This was last year, after Rosie’s post box run of Leicester. Did you know every post box in Britain has its own code? Neither did I, till I’d run round the leafy suburbs of Leicester looking for them.

I HATE running, but I loved this run.

I’ve since designed a similar challenge for people who come and stay in our residences to help them get to know the quarters of Manchester quickly and in depth. I am keen to try it out on people, WHEN WE CAN LEAVE THE HOUSE AGAIN. 

This third picture is of the conference karaoke we did in year two of PL, and I like it as it pretty much epitomises everything I wish I did more of – working with my friends, making music, helping people get out of their comfort zones, and crossing the boundaries of what a conference can be.

This is me at the moment, in my back room, writing nonsense on a wall I painted with blackboard paint, principally as writing on it makes me feel like I’m perpetually developing a plan for a heist or some such.

Conferences and Events are already changing in the wake of the current crisis, and so I’m thinking more about how we can bring play to online meetings and events, which is one of the reasons I’ve started dressing up for all mine!

I also want to look at what we can do to ensure the hybrid meetings and events that will take place once we can all hug each other again are as meaningful, collaborative and joyous as possible!

In the meantime, stay safe.x

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Thanks for sharing your story and your photos James.

If you are unlucky, you might be selected as next month’s sacrifice chosen member – we will be in touch!

Last update Sun 22nd March

Are you in Playful Isolation? As organisations are locking down and most of us are being asked to stay at home, we thought it was time to think about how play could help us to cope with distance, isolation and unusual situations.

The following ideas have been gathered from members of the association – thank you to all who responded to the call – and if you have any more ideas to add, or would like to add thoughts on these, please do so in the comment below or tweet #PlayLearn.

Health

• Try adding interest to your day by randomising tasks: number the day’s or week’s jobs to correspond to numbers on a dice, and either roll your timetable in advance, or roll the dice for a new task every hour.
• Follow the wonderful and mysterious A Secret Club on Twitter (https://twitter.com/s_c_h_h_h) for a daily playful challenge. For introverts and extroverts alike (you can choose).

Research
Depending on your field, research can often be isolating in itself; yet Nobel prize winners have mentioned the value of playfulness in important breakthroughs in research.

• Set up one day in the week as a day of opposites. Take some of your thinking, approaches or findings from the last week, and try looking at them from an opposite, unlikely or impossible direction, and play through the scenarios to see if anything new or interesting emerges.

Meetings

• Pass the Banana (contributed by @tobyberesford)
  “It’s a fruit most have at home. So you show it on your screen pass it to the right so it’s off screen, then someone brings in their banana from their left off screen. It works really well and keeps those of us who find these things amusing entertained!”
• Accept failure by starting online meetings with apologies. Apologies for self-isolation failures, for family pets eating documents, for not being able to work out Zoom/Teams/whatever, etc.
• Home with your pets/kids?
  Most people enjoy seeing each other’s pets. Don’t try and lock them out of the room – it cheers us all up when they walk across your laptop!

• For quick catchups with co-workers, why not chat over a casual game? Many multi-player online games support chat: we like Carcassonne or Facebook Scrabble, but there are lots of other options.

Relaxation

• If you are self-isolating with family or friends, take breaks from work at lunchtime or mid-afternoon to play a board, card or video game together. It will help break up the day, provide company, and could re-energise your thinking. 
• HouseParty is a video/chat app which has built in trivia and drawing games.
• Lots more tips on playing games online with friends at Dicebreaker.
• Give everyone in the house / work team a challenge each day (in the style of sneaky cards but keeping things small and achievable with social distancing: such as getting the word ‘aardvark’ into any online meeting without being noticed, or making everyone a cup of tea). You could create a pool of tasks, and each person gets a new random one each day; or each person could challenge another.

Teaching

• This excellent course introduction video from Julia Strand at Carleton College is bound to inspire you to think about your online presence in a more playful way – you have to admire her props and outfit in this one! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_Y2t_WZMx4&feature=youtu.be

Share your ideas!

Learning

• Learn a new playful skill over your coffee breaks each day. Over 8 weeks, that’s 40 mini practice sessions. Juggling, card tricks, mastering a short game, balancing objects on a drink mat, etc. Share your progress on social media.

The next PLA in-person meet was scheduled for 26/27 March at City University, London on the theme of Playfulness at Work.

Sadly, as won’t be a surprise to anyone following the global situation presently, we have decided that it would be unethical to host a meeting in London with colleagues from around the UK. The event would have fallen in the two week period that many universities have earmarked as a closure period to contain the spread of COVID-19.

We’ve therefore taken the difficult and sad decision to postpone the event, with an aim to run it again when the situation has improved (probably in the Autumn).