By Phil Spalding

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A short break, but a working break has been the had in Harrow Area visiting the Digital Schoolhouse Playful Computing Conference 2025 at University of Westminster, Harrow Campus. Playful computing but with a subtle learning mission. In effect Teaching by Gamification of the key skills in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths). Digital Schoolhouse is also partnered with Nintendo. The trade body for the UK games and interactive entertainment industry, Ukie , is also a partner of Digital Schoolhouse.

The conference was the annual meetup of the Digital Schoolhouse representatives over 3 three days talking about Digital Play as a learning tool. On those three teachers from across the UK (including Northern Ireland and Scotland, Wales might have been there and I apologise if I did not notice at the time) were there being shown what an inclusive flipped digital classroom could look like. I was not there with my Teacher hat on but in my role as a digitally curious industry observer. Also great networking opportunity. Companies working on products in the Educational sector were present on day two with stands and showcasing skills.

As with all blogs written our Cambridge Online Learning Computing WordPress platform our 500 Pennies of Thought is 500 words long or a three minute read. I will highlight some of the key moments for me. There were so many great motivational points that over the next few days there will be more blog posts concerning this. Some of the offerings were visually very impressive as to the technology used. Others were equally very impressive as they also realised that in some areas of the world access to the internet and power might be limited. Providing unplugged resources in written form is equally valuable for developing computational thinking skills. It also preserves that age old skill of writing. Without that skill there would be no history only an oral tradition of passing on knowledge. Every once in a while a Dark Age emerges, a digital future should avoid this if there are enough digitally aware people. For digital skills to be preserved numeracy skills competency also needs to be expanded.

Three highlights for me personally that cover the above are discussed briefly below. As mentioned there are a further set of blogs to follow.

Firstly it was a pleasure to see Eloise Singer’s of Singer Studios concept of the Pirate Queen VR game. Initially when seeing the session programme I thought the title was the famous Irish Pirate Queen Grace O’Malley. I was wrong it was about the Chinese Pirate Queen. Here below is the behind the scenes video of Eloise Singer and Lucy Liu explaining the story and how they went about creating the VR Game. I found the achievement very impressive.

A resource that carries on with the same theme as Scratch, the block based platform, used for creating 3D animated games characters. In the IT curriculum we teach in the later stages of KS2 the block programming language Scratch. FlockXR.com is a refinement of the block concept whereby a restricted set of instructions are used that are tailored to just I was teaching a computer lesson where no cover had been provided as such two days after being introduced to FlockXR.com. So with the Year 7 and Year 8 pupils in the Independent School in Cambridge we embarked on the next step from Scratch. Within a few minutes after brief instructions we had characters leaping and bounding about the screen and a room of engaged and happy pupils learning individually and collectively from each other. A Flipped Classroom!

Very pleased to meet the team from The Mathematical Games Company Limited (TMGCL. The expansion of numeracy skills I can see will be aided by their digital content. Algebraic and computational thinking skills are challenged to develop with the free app Star Numbers. The Google Play link if you want to try it out can be found here.

Well have gone slightly over the word limit but the highlighted digital content above are just a few of the amazing Playful Computer Resources. I found the TMGL resource very interesting, so much so I have spoken often with developers in the last week.

With that I conclude with the promise of more detail on the above and other resources that were showcased at the 2025 Digital Schoolhouse Playful Computing Conference.