Playing With Purpose
One of the things I love about my job is the exposure to different ways of learning.
As children we all learned by doing, and in particular by playing games with other kids. Group play not only taught us specific lessons, it also taught us how to collaborate and be on a team. As adults, hands-on learning is still valuable and let’s face it – a whole lot more interesting than sitting still listening to a lecture.
Play With A Purpose is on a mission to bring back play as a learning tool. So when they invited me to bring my markers to Vegas and play alongside them in their Play Room at the IMEX conference, I happily obliged.
The Play Room was a separate room at IMEX that was set up specifically for networking and for hands-on learning. There were 12 presentations throughout the day, all of which were highly participatory. There was also an Idea Bar with idea tenders there to serve up ideas for your latest challenge, or just brainstorm solutions with you.
Throughout the day I bounced around the room listening to conversations, presentations, and ideation sessions. I visually captured the session highlights on white cubes that we stacked into towers and placed around the room . Having visual representations of key learnings created in real time helped the participants to retain the information. It’s also proven to be highly valuable to people who missed a session since they could garner the highlights by quickly looking at the pictures and words on the cubes.
The cube towers were reminiscent of the blocks we all played with as children. What a clever way to foster education and PLAY!
“Well…what can I say...you ROCKED it! Thank you so much for doing such a fabulous job on all the graphic recordings from the PlayRoom sessions. Not only are you a great artist, but you captured the essence of each session perfectly and conveyed it in a colorful and fun way. We love the art boxes!”