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Digital education reading group: June 2025
*How did you react to that deliberately over-the-top headline? Curious, amused, sceptical? Like a good game intro, it was designed to grab your attention and pull you into the adventure.
This June, the Digital Education Reading Group returns to a popular theme: playful learning. We last explored this in our December 2021 session. As before, I hope to encourage you to imagine how games and playfulness can shape how we think about education.
As education professionals we often talk about engagement, motivation, and student-centred design, but what if we borrowed from a field that’s been doing all three brilliantly for decades?
We’ll explore playful learning and ask, can games help us do higher education, better? We’ll look at how playful learning and game-informed approaches can support student engagement, belonging, wellbeing, and deeper learning. After all, if we want students to feel like the heroes of their own education, why not design our courses like quests?
You probably found the title of this post over the top, but the discussion it invites is important: What role can playfulness play in making education more human, hopeful, and effective at scale?
Drawing on The Playful University (Nørgård & Whitton, 2024), we’ll explore play not just as a pedagogical trick, but as a stance; a mindset of curiosity, experimentation, and care. This includes games, but also metaphors, world-building, surprise, and joyful nonsense. Playfulness helps learners try on new identities, take risks, and fail safely. And in a world where students increasingly face anxiety and disconnection, play can be an act of resistance and reconnection.
We’ll also touch on James Paul Gee’s work (2003) on how games teach, and Jane McGonigal’s (2010) argument that gamers are already developing the superpowers the world needs: Urgent optimism, blissful productivity, and the ability to build meaningful relationships. Sounds a lot like what we hope for in graduates, doesn’t it?
Whether you’re game-curious or game-sceptical, this session is a chance to reflect on how a playful mindset, rooted in curiosity, creativity, and care, might shift not just how we design, but how students experience learning.
Questions
- When was the last time you learned something through play?
- What would it mean for a student to feel like the hero of a course/module?
- Where in course design could we make space for surprise, experimentation, or identity play?
- How might student wellbeing improve if failure felt more like a reset button than a red mark?
- Could playfulness be the door into lifelong learning?
Resources and games
1. Play a game!
- I’m currently enjoying Blue Prince which I think will be a strong contender for my Game of the Year.
- Parable of the Polygons by Vi Hart & Nicky Case. A simple game explaining social segregation through interactive models.
- The Republia Times by Lucas Pope. You play as the editor of a state-run newspaper and must balance propaganda with truth.
2. Gee, J. P. (2003) What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy
Gee argues that good video games are powerful learning environments, embedding principles like just-in-time feedback, adaptive challenge and identity-driven motivation: principles often missing from formal education. He highlights how games foster deep engagement, active problem-solving and collaboration, making them valuable models for designing effective learning experiences.
3. Heljakka, K. (2023) Building playful resilience in higher education: Learning by doing and doing by playing
Heljakka discusses how playful learning can build resilience and adaptability, arguing that “learning by doing and doing by playing” helps develop the flexible, entrepreneurial attitude needed to navigate an unpredictable world. By linking play with serious learning goals, the study makes a case for reimagining higher education as a space for joyful, co-creative exploration.
4. Khaldi, A., & Bouzidi, R. (2023) Gamification of e-learning in higher education: A systematic literature review
This literature review explores how gamification is used in online higher education to boost student engagement and motivation, finding that elements like points, badges, and leaderboards are most commonly applied. But while the game elements are popular, the theory behind their use is often missing, and most efforts stop at surface-level tweaks rather than reimagining the learning experience itself. The authors call for more personalised, theory-informed approaches to better harness gamification’s potential in digital learning environments.
5. McGonigal, J. (2010) Gaming can make a better world
In this 20 minute TED Talk, game designer Jane McGonigal argues that the skills gamers develop, like urgent optimism, collaboration and resilience, are exactly what we need to solve real-world problems. Rather than being escapist, she suggests that games can train us to be better problem-solvers and more engaged citizens, if we design them with real-world missions in mind. By channeling the energy and motivation of millions of gamers, McGonigal believes we can create games that don’t just simulate change, but spark it.
6. Whitton, N. (2018) Playful learning: Tools, techniques, and tactics
Tools, techniques and tactics that educators can use to foster a more interactive and enjoyable learning environment. Whitton advocates for a shift from traditional teaching methods to more dynamic approaches that incorporate elements of play to facilitate deeper learning.
7. Nørgård, R. T., & Whitton, N. (Eds.) (2024) The Playful University: Philosophy, Pedagogy, Politics and Principles
We have a physical copy of this book in the office. Dip in to a chapter that takes your interest. Nørgård and Whitton explore how embracing playfulness can transform higher education institutions constrained by market-driven and performance-focused models. Through interdisciplinary perspectives, the book presents philosophical, pedagogical, and political insights into fostering creativity, curiosity, and care within academic environments. The concluding chapter synthesises these insights into eleven guiding principles that advocate for openness, diversity, relational pedagogy, and institutional support for playfulness, offering a comprehensive framework for reimagining universities as spaces of exploration and collective growth .(Northumbria University Research Portal)
In a world where online education is often framed by deadlines, discussion boards, and digital checklists, is there room for dragons, dice rolls and delight?
List of topics discussed at previous meetings