Sarah’s #BetterWays moment

What was your experience of the Walkshop?

First of all, it was pretty cold! Where I live is right on the bank of the Thames, so I had to wrap up warm. It was very positive. It wasn’t this but it felt like it was the first time I’ve been out yet this year! As you said during the Walkshop, quite often we’re treating walking as a way of getting from A to B, so to have that permission to walk for walk’s sake, or to view it as something for yourself rather than a functional thing you’re doing, is really good.

After you led us through the preliminary Tune Ups, to get us tuned in, you then set up the Quest, and you hadn’t gone far into that, 20 secs in maybe, when I spotted the thing that eventually became my thing! I didn’t want to see the rest of it as wasted time so I tried looking round for something else but I kept coming back to that, that was the thing, it literally grabbed me and pulled me and said “I’m here!”

Great! What was the thing?

Because of the field I work in – games-based learning – I tend to notice things that are game-like references. Also, because it’s the beginning of the year, I’m thinking about things I want to achieve this year. So, I saw this thing on a route I often take. It’s on a building that isn’t something I’d notice normally, a hall next to a church where they do cadet training. So there was a big sign that said “Level Up”. Now, “Level Up” is something you do in role-playing games, it’s to do with levelling-up your skills or power, and it’s really appropriate for me because that week I’d been planning and working out how to grow my business. It gave me the message that I need to practise what I preach, I need to treat what I’m doing as a game, and design my progress through the business as a game.

So Level Up is a better way for you? This was your Better Ways moment?

I think it’s the underlying message that I should eat my own dog food! Sometimes I find with what I do – particularly because I do it on my own, and I have a lot to do and take on too much probably – that it’s not a great deal of fun! Sometimes it’s stressful. For me, Level Up encapsulated the idea that, yes, you want to grow, you want to move on, you want to make the business something you can make a living out of, but also you need to approach it in a playful way. It was a reminder to me: you’re trying to show people ways they can have fun and learn and you need to have fun yourself and approach it like a game. That was the better way for me!

Amazing. So, you’re a play-based learning expert. Is Street Wisdom a form of play-based learning? And if so, what does that mean?

When people think about play-based learning, people think you’re opening a box, like a board game, or going online and playing a quiz (though to be honest that’s at the lower end of games-based learning), but for me it doesn’t have to be about that. It’s the idea you’re encouraging your learners to access their inner playfulness. They don’t have to be “playing a game”. For me, playfulness is about curiosity, discovery, experimentation, social interaction with other people, bouncing off of other people, it’s about achievement, it’s about that feeling of winning which is often brought up in games. It’s about collecting new ideas and synthesising new ideas in ways you’ve not thought before, so games are ways to bring that out of people.

For me, Street Wisdom is extremely playful because it’s inviting people to look at something with which they’re very familiar in a totally different way and to experiment and play with it, to bend it in their minds and get something totally new out of it. Taking what you already have – your existing experiences and ways of thinking – and smashing that together with something mundane – the streets – is very playful.

The outcomes are playful as well, you’re asking people to discover things, and that’s a very playful outcome. Obviously with learning, the outcomes are classically around “teachers filling learners up with knowledge”, but that’s not learning, that’s teaching. Learning is something that is done by the learner rather than done to them.

For me there’s no difference between fun and learning. We’ve got the way we think games-based learning the wrong way round. We think learning is boring and have to gamify it. But it’s the other way round. The very best games are good games because you’re learning while you’re playing them. Learning is intrinsically fun and if we want to make a good game we have to build learning into it.

That’s so interesting, thank you Sarah, for your time today. It was a fun chat and I learned a lot!

Thank you, I’m looking forward to the next Street Wisdom Online!