BETT 2010: Edutainment at its best
Game for a bit of fun at BETT? Learning doesn’t have to be dull or boring, and Professor Stephen Heppell’s new feature at BETT 2010, ‘Playful Learning,’ is set to prove just that.
BETT, the world’s largest educational technology event, returns to London Olympia in January 2010 and is known for its insightful feature areas, seminars and 700 plus exhibitors. BETT’s key feature for 2010 is the brand new ‘Playful Learning’ zone, a fully interactive area for visitors to immerse themselves in educational gaming at its best and overcome pupil engagement issues.
Playful Learning has been developed by Prof. Stephen Heppell (winner of the ‘Outstanding Achievement’ award at the 2009 BETT Awards) following the huge success of last year’s key feature area ‘Learning Elsewhere,’ which took education out of the classroom. Playful Learning includes live on-stage demonstrations and the chance for children and adults alike to test exciting educational games new to the market. The feature aims to provide learners and visitors with interactive opportunities to contextualise games-based learning and witness how games can assist to reinvigorate young people in educational settings.
Prof. Stephen Heppell outlines the significance of this new feature at BETT 2010: “Survey after survey suggests that our UK schoolchildren may be some of the least happy in Europe. Playful learning is great fun and has re-energised classrooms, rekindled school-parent relationships, re-engaged brains and provided at times a powerfully competitive space for problem solving, and at other times a place for real individual concentration. Now games can involve running through real woods, linking with global teams, problem solving at a GPS location, laughing, moving, jumping and performing. Just as learning has escaped from the classroom, so games have escaped from the computer screen.”
Richard Joslin, exhibitions director at Emap Connect continues; Feedback from leaders and practitioners puts pupil engagement issues at the heart of some of today’s challenges for educators. The Central Feature at BETT aims at addressing and reflecting this by offering up a view on how pupil engagement can be addressed through Playful Learning or learning through games technologies. Working with Prof. Stephen Heppell to deliver this feature has enabled us to create highly inspirational content at the heart of BETT for today’s and tomorrow’s educationalists, their classrooms and ultimately their learners.
BETT runs from Wednesday 13 to Saturday 16 January at Olympia, London. Visitors can now register for free, quickly and easily online at www.bettshow.com.
About Emap
Emap Ltd is a leading business to business media group and the largest UK exhibition organiser with brands in education that include BETT, the BETT Awards, The Education Show and the Scottish Learning Festival.
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