Free Workshop

Led by Carrie Lobman, Gwen Lowenheim and Jiunwen Wang, PhD

Online

Friday, October 25 from 12:00-1:30 MST

Register Here

Looking to make your classroom more inclusive, collaborative, and fun? Improv can do just that—while keeping it rigorous and engaging!

Join us for a hands-on workshop where you’ll discover how improvisation can transform your teaching, spark creativity, and build a vibrant learning community. Using improv’s core principles like “Yes, And…” and “Make the ensemble look good,” you’ll learn how to create dynamic, responsive classrooms that foster deeper connections, curiosity, and **making discoveries** alongside your students.

Walk away with fresh tools and global examples to bring new energy to your lessons and support your students in taking meaningful, collaborative risks. Let’s co-create, perform, and explore new ways to teach and learn together!

Carrie Lobman, PhD – Dr. Lobman is an educational researcher, trainer, and teacher educator whose research explores the value of improvisation and play for learning and development. She is a nationally recognized advocate for play and creativity for the education of people of all ages. She is a consultant to educational programs internationally, most recently in Dhaka and Sao Paolo. In 2011 she joined the Board of Directors of the national All Stars Project, where she serves as a consultant to its Institute for the Study of Play.  She currently serves as the pro-bono director of pedagogy for the East Side Institute. Her publications include: Unscripted Learning: Using Improvisational Activities Across the K-8 Curriculum (Teachers College Press) with Matt Lundquist; and Play and Performance (University Press of America) with Barbara O’Neill.

Gwen Lowenheim, MSEd

Gwen Lowenheim is the Founder and Coordinator of International Conversation Groups & its Facilitator Training Program at Pace University where she also supervises a Civic Engagement component for both programs. Gwen is a Writing & TESOL instructor, Organizational & Project Based Coach, Teacher Trainer and co- founder of “Yes, and…” Higher Education Network. 

Gwen trains and supervises educators and social entrepreneurs around the world in a social therapeutic, performance-based learning approach that brings creativity and innovation into classrooms, organizations and community-based programs. Her programs introduce theatrical improvisation, philosophical exploration, remix and group play in developing collaborative teams, leadership development, language learning and stress management.  

Jiunwen Wang, PhD

June is a Senior Lecturer at the Singapore University of Social Sciences, where she adds a dash of creativity to leadership development module in the Human Resource Management Programme. Her research dives into the wonderful world of improv and its magical effects on individuals. Right now, she’s designing  a fresh leadership course that blends improv into the classroom, bringing spontaneity and flexibility to future leaders. She has also published teaching activities utilizing improv and artistic methods, including a thought piece on a flourishing classroom.

In her artistic adventures, June is also exploring Playback Theatre, where stories come alive on stage, and in her spare time, you’ll find her singing her heart out with the Singapore Symphony Chorus!

Sign up today: https://www.eventbrite.com/x/1041332693117/

Welcome to October. That can only mean one thing:

The deadline for submitting your playful online techniques to the Professors at Play Online PlayBook is only a month away!

We have been collecting playful ideas for making online learning more relevant, engaging and fun! And we want to hear from you. Whether you have a tried-and-true technique you’d like to share or have a brainstorm of something that you think might work, get in touch. You can find all the information about the Online PlayBook here:

https://professorsatplay.org/professors-at-play-online-playbook/

Also, as an update on the production process.

Originally, the PlayBook was going to be published by ETC Press. The ETC team has evolved the platform into a new consortium:  Play Story Press. We will be moving this PlayBook and future publications under the PSP umbrella. You can read more about the new consortium here:

https://professorsatplay.org/new-play-press/

In November, we will edit the PlayBook and produce the final formats and layouts. We plan to have the digital and print versions out early in 2025. No waiting around years to see your work in print! Submit this month and help spread the word that playful pedagogy matters.

Submission information and details are on the Professors at Play website:

https://professorsatplay.org/professors-at-play-online-playbook/

And Happy Halloween! May all your tricks be treats!

You might have noticed that The Professors at Play AI PlayBook was put out by Play Story Press and wondered, “Who is that?”

In short, PSP is the evolution of Carnegie Mellon’s ETC Press. The new consortium will carry on the work started with ETC, and will be run by ETC Press’ founder, Drew Davidson.

As an open community publishing consortium, PSP is committed to serving the broader play community through open-access publishing. Professors at Play is delighted to participate as one of Play Story Press’s founding community partners. Leveraging the PSP platform and consortium, we can now publish under the Professors at Play Publications at Play imprint. What does this mean to the P@P community? Several things:

• Having an academic press publishing partner allows us to make longer-term publishing plans without worrying about where things will end up.
• The PSP format is super flexible. We will be able to produce non-traditional publications like the AI PlayBook, but we can also support peer-reviewed articles and books as well.
• More control over the publishing process means we can get things out more quickly!

Check out the Play Story Press website to see the press’ current work and learn more from the press release below:

Play Story Press – An Open Community Publishing Consortium

We are excited to announce the founding of Play Story Press™, https://playstorypress.org, an open community publishing consortium of/by/for the field and our community. It is a diamond open-access academic publishing initiative in which contributors retain all of their intellectual property. We work with our contributors in as timely a manner as possible so that we can share ideas that have impact and significance in our society. The common tie for all these is a focus on issues related to stories and play as they are applied across various fields. The concepts of story and play are broad and diverse—from entertainment and narrative to media studies and social studies, games and technology to health and enjoyment, education and learning to design and development, and more. 

Play Story Press is a culmination of 20 years of open-access publishing and collaborating with the community. Our founders started ETC Press in 2005 as an experimental open-access academic publishing imprint, and the success we had was a direct result of all the quality work that was written by our community. Inspired by this, Play Story Press is an evolution to become even more focused on the community and field. The consortium comprises an exceptional group of partner organizations that will work together, shaping and supporting Play Story Press for the field and community. The following groups are committed to this endeavor (and we’re actively in discussions with more potential partners):

Analog Game Studies

Association for Computing Machinery

Association for Research in Digital Interactive Narratives

Broke the Game

Connected Learning Alliance

Digital Games Research Association

Digital Storytelling Lab

Game Genius

Games for Change

Games+Learning+Society

Higher Education Video Game Alliance

International Game Developers Association

iThrive Games / History Co:Lab

Joan Ganz Cooney Center

Knowledge Commons

Learning Games Network

Meaningful Play

Professors at Play

Remake Learning

Serious Play Conference

Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games

Take This

Thriving in Games Group (formerly Fair Play Alliance)

Play Story Press™ is an independent non-profit organization powered with input and involvement from the consortium, our contributors, and the community at large. This continues our innovations in publishing, and we invite people to participate. Together, we can explore and create the future of open academic publishing, sharing and spreading ideas and knowledge that can help change the world for the better.

Have an idea to make online classes more fun? Well, what are you waiting for? Submit your creative solutions to the Professors at Play ONLINE PlayBook! With a winter 2025 publishing date looming, we are happy to announce the submission deadline: Halloween, October 31st. Talk about fun deadlines.

Before you think, “Gee, I’d love to submit something, I am just not sure I have time”, keep a couple of things in mind:

1. You don’t have to submit a technique that you have tried in class. Have a clever idea? Write it up and send it in. Someone will surely give it a go:)

2. You don’t need to write a long, detailed submission (although that’s fine too).  For example, check out this superb submission from Professor at Play Andrew Davies (who generously offered to share in advance):

Find, or create, a black and white coloring book image. Have this image prominently displayed in your presentation software. Then share your screen so that participants can draw on the image with the annotation tools available in Zoom or other web-conferencing software. 

Quick. Simple and brilliant. Let Andrew be your inspiration. Submit your playful ideas today!

Remember the sound of the school bell on the last day of class before summer vacation? That bell combined the thrill of freedom with a sense of accomplishment and spiced with the excitement of summer vacation plans.

Things have changed and summer might look more like catching up on research, teaching a summer section or digging into that long list of overdue household chores. But while you are busy adulting this summer, remember to take some time to find that summer joy you had when you were a kid.

Here’s a list of 10 ideas to turn your professorial summer into a Playcation!

1. Dream up 10 playful activities you can implement this fall in your classes, but all of them have to include ping pong balls.
2. Eat at a restaurant serving a cuisine you have never tried before. If you don’t live close enough to a good option, look up a recipe online and order the ingredients from Amazon.
3. Take $20 to your nearest dollar store. Buy 20 things and then figure out how to integrate them into a class this fall.
4. Call an old friend you haven’t talked to in at least a year and see how they are doing. And tell them the dumbest joke you can think of.
5. Pull out lecture slides for a class you will teach in the coming year. Randomly select 12 slides and no matter what is on the slide, make it more fun. If you get stuck, ask AI for help.
6. Learn 12 words in a language you don’t know. Then, try and drop them into conversation for the rest of the summer. Vivo ludere!
7. Make a Spotify playlist for a class. Give it a title like: Songs to Study Chemistry By or Term Paper Blues. Save it and share it with your students next time you teach.
8. Go to a garage sale, antique store or museum and find something you remember having or enjoying as a kid. Spend a minute remembering everything about that time in your life. Remember being a kid.
9. Head out your front door with your phone. Keep walking until you have found at least one fun thing and take its picture. It could be a funny sign, an eccentric mailbox or a bunch of people playing basketball. Don’t give up until you find some fun. For a bigger challenge, stay out until you have 10 things, and then post them all on social media!4axx
10. Come up with a list of silly, wacky, goofy and playful activities you can offer your students for extra credit. Feel free to use this list as a starting point!

By Nanditha Krishna

As I approach my 25th birthday this June, I find myself reflecting on my journey through my turbulent teenage years to the even more tumultuous twenties, with an evolving sense of self-awareness. Over the years, as I have started living my twenties, I have begun to walk down the rather ‘deep alleys’ of my formative years, revisiting and exploring the patterns I picked up as a child, in order to understand why I function today the way I do and how they shape my present self. It’s quite interesting, because the corpus of data one has of childhood memories is not really extensive, leaving one to make sense of whatever little memory exists.

One intriguing realisation that I have come to terms with is my complete lack of childhood friendships, with very few or no memories of companionship with kids my age, simply due to their absence. However, on the brighter side, I also vividly recall moments of joy that I experienced during all those times when my family would gift me toys and puzzles to play with. I would spend countless hours crafting stories, immersed in my own little world playing with these imaginary characters I had created in my head. While the world saw me engrossed with my toys—jigsaw puzzles, trains, doctor play sets, building blocks and LEGO sets (plus countless other play sets)—to me, I was deeply engaged in storytelling, worldbuilding, designing narratives, and weaving tales with my toys. I neither craved nor felt the need for friends; my solitary play was fulfilling enough for me to stay in my shell. Another distinct memory that strikes a chord with me is that of my parents once taking me to a kids’ park, hoping that this attempt of theirs would make me socialise with other children. Their efforts did prove very futile, and I would always swiftly retreat back to my own world upon returning home. Despite my parents’ attempts to encourage social interaction, my aversion to forced socialisation reinforced my preference for solitary play. In hindsight, I now recognize this tendency as introversion.

As I grew up into my early teens, my passion for video games only intensified—Counter-Strike, Mount & Blade, Hitman, GTA, Need for Speed, Road Rash, Rollcage, historical narratives in Age of Empires, Diablo, SWAT, and other gamified narratives; you name it, I played it all. My fascination with narratives deepened as I grew up and matured, intensifying my further immersion into interesting stories. I would eagerly collect video game CDs from my extended family whenever we visited our hometown during vacations. Unfortunately, it was also during this period that societal pressures convinced me that it was time to become ‘serious’, prioritising ‘seriousness’ over playfulness. In retrospect, I realised the world held me back, urging me to suppress my playful self in favour of a more serious demeanour and outlook on life. Looking back, I strongly believe that I lost a significant part of myself to this misguided notion of viewing games with negative connotations, rather than seeing them as interesting pastimes and a natural part of life. This misconception led me to forsake gaming and focus solely on the demands of life, causing me to lose a significant part of myself.

Cut to my 20s now. As I transitioned from my teenage years to my early 20s, what earlier seemed to me like loosely connected abstract events in the last five years now make so much more sense to me. I interned at the Empathic Computing Laboratory, an academic research laboratory at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, Australia and the University of Auckland in New Zealand, where I assisted PhD students with empathic interactional and conversational design in a context-aware empathic virtual reality (VR) photography environment. Additionally, I interned at The Verse, a startup focusing on games and well-being, where I contributed to worldbuilding, narrative design, and community development initiatives. I also freelanced with Playwell Bricks Design Studio providing creative editing support. Furthermore, I served as one of the editors of Media, Arts, and Design (MAD) Anthology-II: MAD Pandemic: Stories of Change and Continuity published in association with the Center for Applied Game Studies at the University for Continuing Education Krems, Austria. It has taken me a while to connect the dots and realise that the common thread linking these instances is, in fact, games. Today, I find it heartening and encouraging that despite conforming to societal norms that emphasise cultivating ‘seriousness’ for a period and losing some years to them, I have not entirely lost my passion for games.

As I now learn to let go of the ‘seriousness’ I previously embraced in life due to social pressures and re-embrace my lost playfulness, I am also consciously unlearning, relearning, and reframing the notion that being playful is not a trait inherent only in children but meant for everybody, regardless of age. I am learning that there is something deeply creative and fulfilling about immersing yourself in games, stepping into the shoes of characters, and, above all, being introverted with a deep passion for games.

Of course, I have carried a sense of solitariness with me from my childhood and teenage years into my early adulthood. However, I am also aware that correlation doesn’t imply causation. In my 25 years of existence, I have realised that while gaming was NEVER the reason for my limited social skills, it did help me a lot in coping with the growing pains of life and the intense loneliness I have experienced over time. In fact, playing games helped me feel a lot less alone. In short, books, stories, art, music, films, and games have been constant presences in my life and indeed helped me unleash my imagination. I have come to believe that introversion and gaming can truly be a highly creative combination.

Learning social skills still remains a challenge, but a great deal of happiness comes from relearning and knowing that it’s okay to be into games, and it doesn’t have to hinder my ability to form connections with people. Instead, it can be a topic of great conversations. Especially knowing myself all too well—that I usually bond through activities with people, and that games could be one of them too. As I also find my way through figuring out failed friendships, forming and sustaining meaningful connections and friendships in my early 20s, figuring out how to retain my highly sensitive, introverted self in this world, it helps to recall that I was okay as a kid and a teen, in my own little world, and that I will be okay as an adult too, no matter how hard adulting right now seems to be.

Nanditha Krishna
Integrated Masters (M.A) English Language and Literature (2019-2024)
https://nandithakrishna.home.blog/
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham
Amritapuri, India