Playful Learning 2026 Programme
The Grid: Using physical floor activities to enhance learning
Lead Author: Richard Treves
Additional authors:
Timetable: Thursday Session 5: 11:00-11:45, Gallery Room 2
Description:
This interactive session invites delegates to experience and critically
reflect on embodied, floor-based playful learning activities designed to
support conceptual understanding across diverse disciplines.
Participants will engage with deliberately contrasting subject matter —
biomedical science, English literature, and geological “deep time” —
using physical activities on a marked floor space. Throughout the
session, the facilitator will periodically step out of the learner role
to make the pedagogic design explicit, encouraging metacognitive
reflection on how and why the playful, physical approaches support
learning.
The session is designed to foreground key principles of playful
learning, including embodiment, spatial reasoning, collaboration,
productive uncertainty, and reflection.
Session structure
Part 1: The Ordinary Grid — Embodied representations of abstract ideas
Drawing on work with undergraduate students, this section explores how a
simple grid marked on the floor can be used to support learning in a
wide range of subjects.
Participants will use the grid to:
– Physically represent characters from A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
collaboratively constructing a spatial “relationship map” to explore
character dynamics and narrative structure.
– Act as components of a graph in a biomedical problem, requiring
collective reasoning and negotiation to arrive at a solution.
– Respond to Likert-style and multiple-choice questions by positioning
themselves within the grid, demonstrating how abstract data
representations can be made tangible and discussable.
This section will be interspersed with short reflective pauses
exploring:
– how visual and spatial representations support meaning-making,
– how the pedagogy of using conventional graphics translate into
embodied floor-based activities,
– how playful interaction emerges through novelty, teamwork, and
low-stakes experimentation.
Part 2: The Exploded Clock — Playfully engaging with deep time
The second part introduces an in-development outreach activity designed
to help learners grapple with the concept of deep time — the vast
evolutionary timescales over which life developed from simple cells to
complex organisms. Participants will work in small teams using an
“exploded clock” consisting of four large clocks, each representing a
different temporal scale. Through a structured, game-based challenge,
teams will compete to place key evolutionary events at appropriate
points on the clocks.
This activity will be followed by a facilitated discussion comparing:
– the affordances of the clock-based game with the grid-based
activities,
– how competition and collaboration influence engagement,
– how the design could be adapted or improved for different audiences or
learning contexts.
The session is informed by research on embodied cognition, social
constructivism, and playful learning, and aims to bridge theory and
practice through participant experience.
References, web links and other resources:
1.Beauchamp & Kennewell (2010) — Interactivity in the classroom and
its impact on learning
A foundational article on interaction and technology in learning
environments.
Link (abstract and reference):
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ871781
DOI link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2009.09.033
2. James Paul Gee (2003/2007) — What Video Games Have to Teach Us About
Learning and Literacy
Explores learning principles embedded in games that transfer to
educational contexts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Video_Games_Have_to_Teach_Us_About_Learning_and_Literacy
Note: The full book isn’t freely available online, but many
institutional libraries have access.
3. Margaret W. Wilson (2002) — Six views of embodied cognition
Key review paper on embodied cognition, useful for understanding
embodied, spatial, and physical learning.
Archive link to the paper: https://philarchive.org/archive/ADAEC-2
4. Lakoff & Johnson (1999) — Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied
Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
Seminal book on embodied cognition and how the body shapes conceptual
understanding.
General info/description from a Google Books entry:
https://books.google.com/books/about/Philosophy_in_the_Flesh.html?
id=YF6JAgAAQBAJ
5. Gee, J.P. learning principles and game-based learning
For a concise online explanation related to Gee’s principles of learning
in games (used widely in educational work):
Overview: https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-2/gee-on-what-video-
games-have-to-teach-us-about-learning-and-literacy