106 things we don't know

Play Sandbox kicked off in style last week with our first workshop, bringing together the six teams for two days at the Pervasive Media Studio.

Play Sandbox kicked off in style last week with our first workshop, bringing together the six teams for two days at the Pervasive Media Studio. The aim was to introduce them to each other, to our ethos and to begin the process of working with the Young Coaches on making a brilliant new thing.

As REACT's Director, Jon Dovey, put it 'as far as getting a really interesting bunch of people in a room goes, this was way up there'. Which is great because, the more I reflect on it, the clearer it becomes that Play Sandbox is all about the people and their relationships to each other. It was obvious from the moment that the teams introduced themselves (via the medium of top trumps) that they are an amazing repository of shared interests and mutually beneficial skills.

Over the course of the two days we saw this beginning to play out in practice as they developed defence strategies for lemon jousting, discussed the many things that they don't yet know about their projects (106 is the current record) and supported each other in running activities with the Young Coaches. 

The more I talk to people with research expertise and practical experience of designing with children, the more I understand that this also fundamentally relational. In this first workshop therefore we focussed on trying to build the dynamics that will allow a meaningful conversation to take place between our teams and the children that they work with, informing and inspiring ideas without setting up false expectations on either side. This is really hard. We had fantastic talks from Hannah McVey (who is working directly with our Young Coaches) and advisor Danae Stanton-Fraser about some of the practicalities and research that should be considered as we embark on the process with advice ranging from don't assume balloons will be fun (Seren is frightened of them) to which methodology is appropriate to our timescale.

We aim to nourish and grow our Play Sandbox relationships by encouraging the group to be generous with their mistakes, opinions and knowledge and by playing, drinking and eating together often. We have a lot of questions that we can't yet answer but I am hopeful because, to quote one of our Young Coaches (Jude) "child plus adult equals..... pretty good".

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