Towards the mapping of learning, playful, and frugal aspects for developing 21st century competencies and resilience

The paper draws from the development of playful approaches in education in the ACES project (http://aces.gchangers.org), which aims to underpin a playful approach as an empathic, agentic, and frugal means for engaging young people within a creative inquiry process to enhance social resilience. Play is considered an enabling instrument for equipping young people with the relevant skills to manage the realities of tomorrow, where play is the freedom for them to engage with, develop curiosity about, and learn from the world and people that surround them in positive ways. Acknowledging that there is a link between play and the development of a range of competences young people will need to flourish, this paper proposes a mapping framework towards articulating the relationships between the aspects of play, the competencies that playful learning may afford, and the types of resilience that these competencies may develop. Such a mapping approach can be used to analyse and form considerations for the design of playful educational activities. The mapping is co-created with the ACES partners in Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia, and the approach takes inspirations from Arnab et al. (2015)’s Learning Mechanics-Game Mechanics (LMGM) mapping model which has been extended to consider motivational theory (Proulx et al., 2017). The paper will present the mapping framework of the aforementioned aspects and provide a mapping example using the “STEMBucket” programme in Malaysia, which is designed to engage teachers and learners in playful STEM activities towards social innovation and resilience development.