Playing to Learn: Using Lecturer-Designed Board Games as Playful Assessment in Higher Education

Lead Author: Louise Kilbane

Additional authors:

Timetable: Friday Session 12: 11:15-12:00,

Description:

Early childhood education is a discipline in which students are explicitly expected to value, design, and facilitate playful learning experiences for children. Play is widely recognised as central to young children’s learning, development, and meaning-making. Yet, within higher education, students preparing to become early childhood educators are frequently assessed through traditional academic formats that position learning as individual, text-based, and performance-oriented. This tension raises important questions about how far assessment practices align with the pedagogical values we promote within the discipline.
This interactive workshop encourages participants to discover how assessment can become a playful, meaningful, and rigorous learning experience. Drawing on research on playful and creative assessment, assessment for learning, and sociocultural theories of learning, the session emphasises the use of a lecturer-designed board game as an assessment method in a content-rich early childhood education module. Play is regarded not as a motivational bonus but as a serious pedagogical attitude that influences how students engage with, interpret, and apply disciplinary knowledge.
Participants will start with a brief segment of the board game used for assessment. Working in small groups, they will move through the game, respond to scenario-based prompts, make decisions, discuss ideas, and address conceptual challenges. This gameplay reflects the student experience and shows how learning can be demonstrated by dialogue, reasoning, collaboration, and the application of theory, rather than just recall.
Following the gameplay, participants will engage in guided reflection and theoretical unpacking. Together, we will examine how specific game mechanics, such as multiple pathways, collaborative problem solving, and opportunities to retry, align with key principles of playful and creative assessment, authentic assessment, and learner agency. Brief research-informed inputs will introduce ideas such as assessment as a site of ongoing learning, opportunities to experiment and learn through safe failure, and asset-based approaches that value diverse ways of demonstrating understanding.
Participants will then proceed to a design-focused activity, where they will begin translating these principles into their own contexts. Using a simple design framework, participants will identify an existing assessment from their practice and begin reconceptualising it through a playful lens. This may involve sketching a board game concept, adapting game mechanics, or identifying playful structures to incorporate into an existing task. The focus is on generating practical, transferable ideas rather than creating a finished product design.
Throughout the session, space will be created for dialogue about opportunities and tensions related to academic standards, inclusivity, workload, and institutional expectations. These discussions are situated within the broader argument that playful assessment can maintain rigour while offering richer, more authentic evidence of learning.
By the end of the session, participants will have experienced a playful assessment in action, developed a theoretically informed understanding of playful assessment, produced an initial playful redesign of one of their own assessments, and taken away a conceptual framework and design prompts to support ongoing experimentation.

References, web links and other resources:

James, A. and Nerantzi, C. (2019) The Power of Play in Higher Education: Creativity in Tertiary Learning. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kim, Y.J. and Saplan, K. (2024) ‘Making a case for playful assessment as asset-based assessment through conjecture mapping’, Learning and Instruction, 90, 101869.

Rodríguez-Ferrer, J.M., Rodríguez Rivera, P. and Manzano-León, A. (2025) ‘Playful methodologies for evaluation in higher education: A systematic review’, EDUTEC. Revista Electrónica de Tecnología Educativa, 91, pp. 305–323.

Woods, P.J. et al. (2023) ‘Playful and creative assessment for learning: Examples and analyses from the field’, in Proceedings of the 17th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS 2023), pp. 1712–1721.

Nicol, D.J. and Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006) ‘Formative assessment and self-regulated learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice’, Studies in Higher Education, 31(2), pp. 199–218.

Zosh, J.M. et al. (2017) Learning through play: A review of the evidence. LEGO Foundation.
https://cms.learningthroughplay.com/media/learning-through-play-review.pdf