Playful Learning Portal

Memo from DPI on Playful Learning Site and Training

A new portal makes it easy for teachers to explore, discover, share, review, and learn games that can help students learn. The Playful Learning platform, playfullearning.com, became available in open beta this month. Designed around the belief that “Play is how we learn best,” the site aims “to introduce truly playful systems and fun worlds that can meet your specific needs and ignite student passion in your classroom.” Playful Learning is a project of the Learning Games Network, a non-profit producer of games for learning grounded in the tradition of game-based learning research at the MIT Education Arcade and the University of Wisconsin’s Games+Learning+Society Center. Learning Games Network is now based in Cambridge, MA and Madison, WI. The group says in the Mission section of its website: “A wise man once said: ‘Play is the highest form of research.’ When you give a learner the space to play and the freedom to fail, awesome things happen.” The network received a grant to conduct events around the country, including one in Wisconsin: at the UW-Whitewater, November 15-16. 2013.