During the summer I went to North Wales with the youth group I help lead. While we were away, we played lots of games. Not high-tech, computer-based games but real-world, physical games. It was a timely reminder to me that play, even for teenagers, does not always depend on bits and bytes but can happily […]
Tag Archives: play
Play and games articles
Some of the articles about play and games that I have seen in the last few weeks. Theory Online Games & Interest-Driven Learning are Transformative for Today’s Young Learners by @constances http://htn.to/anmyvV Three Qualities That Make Video Games Better Teachers Than Teachers from EdReach http://j.mp/lNARUV Gamification time: What if everything were just a game? From […]
Families that play together
There’s a lot of research that seems to state the blindingly obvious but sometimes it is reassuring to discover that our innate beliefs are sound. Like having a local park improves your health or this piece from Concordia University published in the journal Family Relations that reminds us that families that play together are more […]
Where play meets learning
Play’ and ‘games’ are dirty words to many traditional educationalists because of their connotations of trivial, wasteful and indulgent activity. It might hark back to our WASP-ish philosophy that only hardship and suffering are good for the soul. Even the seminal play theorist, Johan Huizinga, argued that play is “an activity connected with no […]
Creativity, Wooing Women and Disneyland
The evolutionary psychologist, Geoffrey Miller, has published many papers speculating about the development of human creativity – that is, why would we evolve in such a way that we create apparently wasteful artefacts such as art, poetry, humour and music? According to Miller it is all about the Mating Mind – it’s peacock feathers and […]
Stopping Children’s Play
The news today made me cry out with primal rage. The UK government is cancelling the funding for thousands of community playgrounds. The Playbuilder scheme was a key element of the 2007 Children’s Act and was establlished in response to the universally acknowledged need for safe outdoor places for children to play. Now the government […]