Stephen Taylor

I have a new blog post out on Games For All looking at the board game Bot Factory. A brilliant game that both mechanically and thematically can be used to explore Kanban methodology and the impact of competitiveness in business/management. #boardgame #education #kanban #creativeHE #playfullearning

Happy 6th Birthday to the Journal of Play in Adulthood!
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Now it has 7 Volumes and over 50 Articles.
In 6 years it has been accessed over 100,000 times!
Find this journal on our website.
@playbrarian.uk #OpenAccess #Play #TeachingAndLearning #PlayResearch #UniversityPress

Digital should be an invisible thread across the whole curriculum. All staff and students should be at the same baseline to ensure they can make the most of the learning resources and be prepared for the real world advances in tech.

Happy to be at the ALT North West user group afternoon at The University of Lancashire, got some interesting talks today. @altnwemg.bsky.social

We are not horses, we are humans. Humans are...

Looking forward to a day of celebrating digital, collaborative learning at @uclan.ac.uk!

Waiting on my train down to London for what promises to be a fun staff conference at work! #teachers5oclockclub

Lifewide vs lifelong learning

Image representing learning from all aspects of life. Generated using Adobe Firefly Lifelong Learning Chances are everyone has heard of lifelong learning. Its a good concept. Acknowledging that you will be learning your whole life, not just within the school setting,…

Early morning at Kirkham and Wesham station ready to head to Durham's 23rd Blackboard User Conference! I'm looking forward to a couple of days focused on improving student's #personalisedlearning using #Blackboard tools to facilitate it. #durbbu #earlymorning #travel

#gamification silly autocorrect!

I'm Stephen Taylor, Learning Technology Lead for Regent's University London. I've been involved in education my entire working life, having taught in all levels. I've always integrated #play and #games into all I do. Partly cos I'm a #geek, but mostly because of the massive positive impact it has.

Spot on. We don't just give texts or diagrams to students and expect them to understand it (usually). You need to correctly package the game within the lesson, or as a #flippedlearning experience that you'll pick apart in the following lesson.

I was chatting with the British Esports Foundation at @jisc.bsky.social #Digifest25 last week. It is a burgeoning field and they are now running multiple level 3 qualifications and working on degree level ones. Esports is a multimillion dollar industry, its definitely worthy of exploration.

That's definitely a game! #ramification of learning is so important. It brings #play back into education which is so often lost. There's a reason early years is all play based - it's the fundamental way humans learn!

Definitely true. You need to guide them to think through the experience critically. They won't have made the connections necessarily, and through questioning techniques you can draw that out of them

Oh I don't know. You will have gained skills at reading other people, judging situations, pre-empting challenges, as well as all the rich lore in the game influencing your imagination and creativity. You'll have learnt a lot more from it than you think! #levelupEDU

I really hate the overuse of the word #resilience, but games truly do help teach kids that. As well as sportsmanship and losing gracefully. It takes time (my daughter will still strop if she loses) but it definitely improves over time. It also helps teach them #agile thinking. Fail fast and learn!

It's a great term. Came across it in my Masters course in Digital Education. That and #habitus are 2 phrases my colleagues are probably sick of hearing from me 😅

The growth you gain in playing games can be massively varied. But the most common forms of growth are in your #numeracy, #literacy, #creativity, #social and #emotional skills as well as #leadership and #teamwork skills. Many games teach #patience, #focus and an eye for detail.

A2 This is the key thing so many people miss. Gaming is a clear example of #lifewidelearning. Unlike #lifelonglearning, which happens at set points in your life, lifewide is where you acknowledge all your experiences as learning opportunities #levelupEDU

And of course we'll can't ignore Minecraft. That has such a huge impact. There's hundreds of premade lessons on education.minecraft.net and it's actually quite easy to use in an education setting. This is my hands on guide to it for HE I made new.express.adobe.com/webpage/Kuow... ##levelupEDU

A4 Throughout my career I've always found games, even just references to games, improve engagement. When I was a science teacher I'd use COD as a tool to teach the principles of momentum. The lads all knew where to aim for a headshot on a moving target. Tapped into that to give the Why. ##levelupEDU

Games for All Discovering Character and Key Life Skills through Play

The last post i put on my A1 reply is relevant here for A3! I'm relaunching my blog gamesforall.net this time focusing on all forms of education, not just PSHE and RE. I'm going to be working with tabletopia to design resources to use any game to teach with. #levelupEDU

Games for All Discovering Character and Key Life Skills through Play

There is a game out there for everyone single topic you can imagine. I'm currently working on my blog gamesforall.net again, this time round focusing on education as a whole rather than just RE.

It removes the fear of failure. Often making it something the players can laugh about communally. Unlike other forms of formative assessment where the feedback is often individual and personal and something they sit with alone.

Going further into this, games are safe spaces to explore failure. Within a game it is expected you will have losers and winners. The outcome isn't really as important as the activity itself. This allows people to fail repeatedly and safely, in a way other education tools cannot match #levelupEDU

A1: The connections are massive. Games create a liminal space as the rules allow you to have some certainty of what players will do next. This frees up a large amount of cognitive load and allows you to speak more freely and have deeper discussions around topics. #levelupEDU

@jisc.bsky.social #Digifest25

Jisc Digifest 2025

This week (w/c 10th March 2025) was my favourite conference for personal CPD (continuing professional development) - Jisc's Digifest. Its an annual 2 day event where UK Further and Higher Education staff involved in the use of educational technology come together for talks on…

A success is a failed failure! - Paul Iske. Such an amazing keynote. Thanks @jisc.bsky.social brilliant start to #Digifest25