So now you’re ready to play – but with what? A system to encourage playful exploration

One of the challenges in encouraging learning through play is to design online environments that are playful yet not distracting; that encourage interaction and exploration with specific learning goals while minimising the distraction of ‘bell and whistles’. This paper presents the application of theories of play and flow in the design of a highly interactive and playful online system that has been used as a research tool to explore students’ exploration and interaction within such environments. We present applications of the system to several different contexts such as choosing university subjects, and solving puzzles. We describe a particular experiment that helped us to identify deficiencies of the system, discuss students’ interactions with it, and describe follow-up work that is both currently underway and also planned for the future.