Hey there,
Welcome to the latest addition to the Boing Blog! 👋 My name is Eve and I run the operations side of things here at Boing. I am a Sport, Coaching and Physical Education student at Oxford Brookes University. I have been fortunate enough to have experienced lots of Boing during my degree whilst working with Kit and Ben! As someone who is just starting on the road to becoming a PE teacher, I am very grateful to work alongside this amazing team who are BURSTING with Boing knowledge that I can take with me on my teaching and coaching journey. In light of this, I’ve come across one element that really fascinates me. This being just how much the power of creativity can affect the learning of children within play! A creative coach, teacher or practitioner is the first step to unlocking the imagination of children during physical activity. When leading activities, a practitioner has the opportunity to tell a story and grasp the minds of those in front of them. Take our game Bears in the Woods for example, there is a ‘hunter’ trying to catch the ‘bears’ and the bears need to make it safely back to their ‘cave’. In reality, a simple game of tag with an added safe zone has just been developed into an elaborative creative adventure! Then we add ‘food’, such as bean bags, that the bears have to get to their caves without being caught by the hunter. Now, there is a group of children invested in this story so much so that when different constraints are added or changed within the game to challenge how they move , they are simply excited for the story to take a new turn because they’re having fun. Using creative imagery within a story to captivate the learners will allow coaches to develop everything from coordination and balance to engaging in a whole repertoire of movements. There is always an opportunity to implement creativity into a coaching session, you just need to unlock your own imagination. Capture the flag can become a game about retrieving the crown jewels back from the thieves who stole it or then teaching a hockey sweep it can be described as slicing through a whole pizza in one go with a long, powerful stroke. Creativity really can be applied to anything! The potentials are limitless. It’s well worth checking out the resources we have to help you on your Boing journey. The Boing PlayTank is a free resource full of creative games and ideas to get children learning through the power of play. Or why not jump into a PlayVenture? Dive into the Boing principles and philosophies which can be applied in all coaching contexts whether it’s activity camps, PE lessons or sports clubs to give you an understanding of how to become a Boinger. I would love to share more information with you and give you an even bigger insight into the Boing world. Just contact me through the support email and I’ll show you how you can get involved! Eve
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Hey there Welcome to the latest addition to the Boing Blog! One written all the way from sunny Sevilla in Spain. My name is Kirsten and I am one of the PhD candidates who work closely with Boing and Sport England on Boing-y research. My role is to explore and evaluate Boing, what it means for the adults who learn the principles and the children who experience it. Last week the research team took the first piece of Boing-y research from the PhD to the European College of Sport Sciences research conference. The conference is traditionally physiology and biomechanics based so taking research all about kids and the adults that work with them is exciting a little unusual. The project was well received with lots of very interesting questions. The presentation I hope is the first of many shedding light on the value of both practitioner education and the child’s voice in research. This time I presented data on the Boing online workshop that has run over the last two years. The data suggests that the workshop run by the team of coaches is effective at training adults on the Boing-y principles with big statistical changes shown. This was not exclusive to an organisations type (sport, community education for example) nor was it exclusive to demographic data (i.e. gender, level of experience or current role). What this means is that statically speaking, the workshop worked for a wide range of people and organisations. This may come as a surprise to some as many of us love running around the sports hall to experience games or meeting in person to discuss training. But… online workshops were effective at training practitioners – in a different way. Now the research does not suggest that online is better that in person training or visa versa, all it does show is that online workshops like the ones hosted during CV19 lockdowns are effective at educating coaches, teaches and wider facilitators. If you are interested in reading more about the research, the commission report that evaluated Boing is widely available online including here. We have even been on a podcast all about the project, which you can listen to on whatever streaming platform you prefer. It is called Exploring coach development 'lasagne' - a conversation with Kirsten Wing and Will Roberts by Talent Equation. I use apple podcasts so here is the link for those who also use the platform.
It was very rewarding being able to showcase some of the work on this project but most of all raising awareness on the many different ways that children can be supported in physical activities in a fun and sustainable way. We even had delegates asking us where they could find the resources for Boing. But it is now your turn, do you have any questions for the researchers? If so please get in touch. Kirsten x Hey there!
Welcome to the latest addition to the Boing blog! My name is Ben, and I’m our Lead Coach Developer here at Boing. I lead a lot of our bespoke work with our fantastic partners, as well as support the building of our resources. As we continue our journey into the world of play, physical activity, and all things movement, we thought best to share some of our journeys up to this point. I have the privilege of being first up! As a (relatively) decent footballer, sport was central to my identity growing up, and subsequently formed a huge part of my career so far. In essence, you could say that I have massively benefitted personally and professionally from my relationship with sport over the years. However, a key aspect of the work of our team here at Boing is to be as introspective and reflective as we can be! Acknowledging how physical activity and sport benefits some, but not all. Our mission has always been to change that! Rolling back to 2015, Boing took their first few steps into trying to change the world of movement for young people. Initially, Boing was a delivery focused initiative, utilising students from Oxford Brookes University to deliver PlayGames from our PlayTank within a group of schools in Oxfordshire. This also happened to be the start of my involvement with Boing, working on the ground delivering games in schools. Our goal at this point was to try and show what Physical Education could look like. That we could move away from more traditional models of movement, by embracing the messy and chaotic world of play. Of course, this did not come without its struggles. A key learning outcome for the Boing team was how to find the balance between child/learner autonomy and freedom, with purposeful and intentional learning outcomes. If you have jumped on a virtual course before, you may have heard us use the metaphor of how we are trying to support a learner ‘jump on the spinning carousel’. If the carousel is spinning too fast, our learners can’t access the game. Spinning too slowly and it’s too easy to jump on. Finding the right speed to stretch our learners, but giving them some success is where the magic happens! So how do we control the spinning carousel? The tool I’m going to focus on here is becoming the Play Maker! The Play Maker is the architect of the learning space, responding to the needs of the learners in that setting. We want to challenge the role of the practitioner in the learning space to be more active, more dynamic, and more responsive. The practitioner as Play Maker becomes an active ingredient in the Play Game. Let’s take our Play Game ‘Escape the Zoo’. Escape the Zoo involves the group of learners moving around the space to collect their food, and return it to their nest. They must negotiate the space whilst moving like their favourite animal and avoiding the zookeepers (Check the game out on the link above). Once we have our Play Game set up, the Play Maker comes alive! 1. We could challenge the whole group by changing the context, switching between night and day, or dry and wet land. By noticing that the game needs to speed up, or slow down, we can make this change to the learning space. By changing the context of the game, we also allow our learners to access their imagination and take ownership of their learning experience. 2. We may also find a learner who is having higher amounts of success. As the Play Maker we could shape their experience by challenging them to move like an animal with a certain number of points of contact with the floor (i.e moving from 2, to 3 or 4). By challenging how they engage with the problems set, we can help them explore new and different ways of how their body relates to the space it is in. 3. We could also give each individual learner greater ownership and autonomy in the learning space. By providing a range of different equipment in the learning space, and assigning different food items based on the colour or shape of the equipment, learners will have to move more purposefully to ensure the animal they choose is getting the food that they choose. 4. If our learners are not having much success then we could manipulate how the zoo keepers engage with the game. We could change how the zoo keepers must tag the animals to return them to the zoo by asking them to tag with two points of contact, or give the zoo keepers a ball that they must tag the animals with. We could also provide the zoo keeperswith a movement problem, constraining them to only hop around the learning space, or provide them with throw down discs/cones which they must use to stand on as they move around the learning space. The Play Makers job in this respect is key. Our job is to help learners explore, exploit, and execute different ways of solving problems with their bodies. The notion of embodiment, resonates with our understanding of physical literacy. We want to place learners in contexts that require them to negotiate a set of problems. By doing so, they’ll start to explore how their body relates to the world in different ways and in different spaces. We are not concerned with ever reaching the peak of the Physical Literacy mountain, rather, we are focused around ensuring every learner has an opportunity to understand how their body relates to the world, and give them confidence to continue on that journey throughout the life course. Our job is to help them on their way with change its, challenges and play ups. We have absolutely loved exploring this with some of our partners recently during our full day face-to-face workshops. Recently we teamed up with our friends at Loughborough Schools Foundation, supporting their team across their different school sights spice up their teaching toolbox with some of our Boing principles. Focusing on being active in the learning space, we experienced a few games from the Boing PlayTank, and then spent some time exploring their own games, whilst thinking about how to keep the game constantly regenerating, keep the problems dynamic, and how to support learners on different learning trajectories. I’m going to wrap up this brief post with an invitation for all those interested in exploring play as an incredible tool to change the nature of physical activity. Our Boing PlayTank is free to access, and we love seeing our friends and partners using our games within their worlds. So, as we approach the beautiful summer months, get out and play!! Pick 3 games from our PlayTank and go and explore them. We would love to hear your feedback on how they went, but most importantly we want to hear how much you enjoyed embracing play! If this isn’t enough for you, then book a course with us! We run virtual courses, as well as face to face courses where we explore all of our resources and PlayGames, as well as the underpinning principles of Boing. Over the next few months, we will hear from some of our other Boingers on the team and start exploring more of the key concepts that underpin our work! Yours in Play! Ben x |
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