#Dispatches: Current Projects and Changes Ahead

It’s been a busy few months in the GameChangers team with new research bids in development, ongoing case studies in full swing within the ACES project, and a whole host of other initiatives underway at various stages of development. There isn’t much I can share at this current time, other than to say there’s a bunch of exciting changes ahead, including some new project ideas I hope to kick start very soon, one of which I’ve been trying to start since way before the pandemic and I’m finally getting the chance to it… I hope. We have the team, the will, and the opportunity, so I’m optimistic. Finger’s crossed. 🤞 Over the last few months I’ve been gradually shifting my day-to-day activities into the practice-based research camp as I transition into more of an academic role, albeit still firmly grounded in design and practice- so help me God!

Meanwhile, I’m currently hard at work compiling a paper on frugal education that will set the foundations for my future research practice, including work with our awesome ACES partners in Vietnam, who I’m very excited to be collaborating with. The ongoing pandemic and it’s uncanny ability to throw spanners in the works has meant it’s been a challenging time for collecting research data, especially across continents! Shout out to Thom Thom and the rest of the Vietnam team for their amazing ongoing help and support.

While all of this has been underway, the Indonesian ACES team have been hard at work with their own case studies. We’ve been collaborating on a series of papers exploring the impact of frugal and playful approaches to education design in rural Indonesian schools during the pandemic. It has been an absolute pleasure working with them on a variety of papers, they are a very passionate and talented team. I’ve learnt a lot about the academic writing process; how to work effectively in a distributed team through a myriad of challenging circumstances; and how to solve complex problems across multiple languages and cultures. I can’t stress how valuable a learning process it’s been working on an international project such as this. Given the opportunity I think everyone should do it.

We’ll finally get the chance to meet the various project teams in person here in the UK, ahead of the GameChangers Remix Play 5 summit, where we’ll be mapping out the impact of our work across the ACES case studies and planning papers to publish our findings. I look forward to meeting everyone face-to-face soon, pandemic-permitting.

In the meantime, it’s back to project deadlines and writing, and hopefully I’ll get to spend some time developing some supporting materials for the Frugal Education Action Cards. It’s currently annual leave season for our team, so we’ll see how that goes! 😆 Anyway, that’s enough from me, see you around soon.