The PLAYground is an online platform for the curation, creation and circulation of user-generated learning activities that encourages both adults and youth alike to discover, learn and teach each other. It is designed to cultivate and promote learning activities centered on the idea of a “challenge.”

A challenge is a transmedia lesson that synthesizes media content and a call for action. Challenges are made by Media Elements, which provide a very dynamic, interactive and engaging way to support learning. Media Elements can be of type video, text, link, or image, as well as spark a discussion in “What do you think?” or call to action for participants to respond through a media creation of their own in the “Your Turn” interactive elements.  These media elements combined onto a collaged canvas synthesizes what we mean by a challenge, a hands-on learning activity.

Challenges can be used in and out of the classroom and serve as a framework for student-centered learning and inquiry on specific topics that participants are passionate about. In large and small groups, participants are able to: design and participate in challenges; identify these challenges’ potential contributions to teaching and learning; reflect upon their own pedagogical practices; and discover intersections and practical take-away learning.

As a design framework for learning technologies, we have built the PLAYground with the 4 C’s of Participatory Design in mind, conceived to support practices related to the four forms of participation within participatory cultures (i.e., affiliations, expressions, circulations, and collaborative problem-solving). The design principles call for characteristics and features of technologies that afford activities and interactions among users and between user and interface conducive to promoting the characteristics of a participatory culture. The 4 C’s of Participatory Design framework is intended to inform the design, implementation, and evaluation of new media technologies that mediate learning in a participatory culture.

The goal is for learners to:

• Create artifacts, events, and interpretations to express individual and/or collective feelings, insights, and experiences.
• Connect with other learners of shared interests to affiliate with a domain.
• Circulate content to engender shared knowledge networks.
• Collaborate on design activities to foster problem-solving, knowledge-building, and / or community-expression.  

We constantly ask the following questions to improve its design:
a) How do we provide mechanisms for CREATING?
b) How do we facilitate CONNECTIONS in a design model?
c) Have we created transparency for media to CIRCULATE?
d) Are there ways for communities to COLLABORATE and build upon each others’ knowledge?

The platform is user friendly, and is currently being piloted with RFK-LA (Legacy in Action) and Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) public school teachers and students from a range of disciplines (e.g., special needs, math and sciences, health, literacy, social studies, etc). Every teacher who participated in the pilot phase testing of the PLAYground derived benefit, regardless of classroom access to technology. Those who lacked digital tools utilized the challenge content within the PLAYground to create dynamic lessons off-line using the 21st century skill sets implicitly designed within each challenge in the PLAYground.