The latest heatwave has broken in the UK, but still lots of hot Playful Learning news for you lovely people wherever you are and whatever the weather.
We’re still giddy from another successful Playful Learning Conference in Brighton, we’ve little write up and links to the programme for you separate to this!
The Journal of Play in Adulthood is in full flow, with calls for special issues on Table-top games for learning and for the Playful Leader as well as our open call for papers of course and lots of new papers published. Take a look at our fuller journal update 😊
We recently launched the Playful Activity Library. We invite you to explore this curated collection of active, playful activities designed for use in adult education settings. This library supports our playful learning community by showcasing inspiring practices, sparking new ideas, and encouraging collaborative connections. We welcome all forms of playful approaches—whether it’s a quick icebreaker, a creative classroom activity, or a fully developed board game. Whatever your contribution, we’d love for you to share it with the community! Submit your own activities, or browse through to find inspiration from other submissions.
Can we explore difficult subjects through playfulness? A brand new app, “Empire Retold: Bellahouston A.R.“ attempts to do just that. It is focussed on telling alternate histories of the British Empire Exhibition of 1938 that took place in Glasgow, and playfully questioning the ‘authorised’ history and legacies of this event. Three narrative trails, delivered through a location-based Augmented Reality (AR) app, combine diverse interpretations of history, colonialism, and identity. One story is focussed on a debate between two trees in the park on whether the 1938 Exhibition should be celebrated or condemned, another allows the player to join a reunion of statues who were on display at the Exhibition, and a final narrative lets players listen in as hackers disrupt the official historical radio broadcasts.
The app aims to highlight less-told stories and enable geographical and conceptual links to be made between archive data and contemporary understandings of the Exhibition and its legacies. The app was co-produced with communities local to the site of the Exhibition, as part of “Decolonising the British Empire Exhibition of 1938 through Augmented Reality Narratives”, a research project led by Daisy Abbott https://sit.gsa.ac.uk/project/decolonising-augmented-reality The project also resulted in a card deck that allows exploration of ‘polyvocality’ using the Empire Exhibition as a case study. Empire Retold aims to increase tolerance of different viewpoints on a controversial topic and encourages both critical and playful re-readings of history.
You can download Empire Retold: Bellahouston A.R. from the Apple or Android app stores.