Welcome to December’s update from the Playful Learning Association!
We recently had a lovely meetup at Exeter University in their fabulous Creative Quadrant on the theme of “playfulness on a budget”, see our last post for what went on, lots of lovely stuff there for your delight.
Our next meetup will be an online one, with a theme of Compassion and Playfulness* – pencil the 21st February in your diary and start thinking about what you might like to share… please get in touch with any thoughts.
Our next in-person meetup will be due sometime around April / May and we recently had some of our Scottish members ask us to come closer to them for this next one (we don’t think we’ve had one in Scotland since 2012). So if anyone can host us in Scotland, please get in touch – meetings are always Thursday afternoon and Friday morning and we ask that the host provide space, refreshments, and a light lunch when people arrive. We’ll organise the programme 😊
The PL25 conference call for sessions is now open on the theme of Surprise and Disguise, so get your thinking caps on (and fake ‘taches?) and get those proposals in for what we’re sure will be another fabulous Playful Learning conference next year.
UK Games Expo will be back at the NEC in 2025, and on Sunday 1st June will be holding its inaugural academic track around Games in Education. We’ll have a stand on the edge of the Playtest Zone to interact with the 40,000+ visitors for the long weekend, and we’ll also have our own area to demo games for learning. The Journal for Play in Adulthood is creating a UKGE special edition to accompany the symposium.
If you’d like to be involved with this UK Games Expo academic track in any way, please get in touch with Liz Cable (L.Cable@leedstrinity.ac.uk). It’s a great opportunity for colleagues in the PLA to showcase their work, and their games, or just get involved in a really fun event.