Play, (Re)Design & Learn
ABOUT
The Play, Redesign & Learn Group was founded by a team of learning sciences researchers at the University of Calgary, Werklund School of Education. Through design and conducting research projects in real-world learning settings, we explore the emergent processes of learning and how different forms of learners' collaborative redesign, as structured but playful practices, could mediate these processes. We study how such learning projects, structured based on a redesign approach, could provide possibilities of critical thinking and deeper engagement with complex disciplinary and interdisciplinary concepts.
Our work is informed by sociocultural theories of learning, design theories, and complexity research. At the Play, Redesign & Learn Group, we continue exploring our redesign-based learning approach in relation to these theories and developing our understanding of its potential based on the emergent findings of our different research projects.
Relying on our experience in these projects and how we theorize the notion of redesign, we also present some possible tools and structures that could be helpful in pursuing a learning project with a redesign approach.
Research Projects
Redesigning Tabletop Games as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy -School project (ongoing)
Principal Investigator: Dr. Beaumie Kim
Co-PI: Jerremie Clyde
Project focus:
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Exploring how learners could adapt and evolve through interactions with new group members and ideas and critically reflect on their individual and collective work
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Examining how the game redesign project enabled learners to showcase cultural pluralism by pursuing evolving paths based on their various individual and collective ideas, interests, and cultures
Redesigning Tabletop Games as
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy-Family project
Principal Investigator: Dr. Beaumie Kim
Co-PI: Jerremie Clyde
Project focus: Exploring how the family members engage in social learning through redesigning tabletop games (i.e., games with boards, cards or other objects), and how they reposition generational differences, practices, and ideas as resources for their collective design and learning process.
Explore More
Principal researcher: Dr. Reyhaneh Bastani
Project focus: Supporting grade-7 students to engage with emergent systems and to imagine and model new possible structures through redesigning the board game Pandemic
Developing mathematical literacy through board game redesign
Principal researcher: Dr. Beaumie Kim
Co-PI: Dr. Miwa Aoki Takeuchi, Dr. Barb Brown
Project focus: Supporting grade-3 and -4 students' mathematics learning (focusing on the topics of area and multiplication) through creating a 2-dimensional version of the Inversé board game
Principal researcher: Dr. Beaumie Kim
Project focus: Supporting grade-8 students' understanding and competencies in STEAM while developing a transdisciplinary approach
