Play in education,
seriously?

ACES has been shortlisted in the 2023 QS Reimagine Education awards!
We are honored and thrilled to announce that we have been shortlisted for the Sustainability Education Award by QS Reimagine Education through our ACES – Developing resilience through playful and frugal education design project!
We believe that everybody can play and create games. We believe in games for learning, and learning through play.
GameChangers is a community of researchers, developers, and practitioners interested in exploring the opportunities of creating playful and gameful experiences as mediums for both expression and learning.

Empathic Co-Creation: The creation and co-creation of playful and gameful systems.

Remix Play 2: Card game design workshop, 2018
The creation and co-creation of playful and gameful systems, as an activity on the edge of the diverse fields is a productive ground to cultivate creative and innovative mind-sets.
Creative and playful spaces enable the hybridity of different disciplines, interests, and backgrounds to come together to experiment and learn how to fruitfully cooperate. GameChangers emphasises a pragmatic approach for empathically designing, developing, and implementing playful and gameful intervention, reflected by its various initiatives involving educators and learners in marginalised communities.
Frugal Education. Designing creative, practical, and sustainable education by leveraging frugal innovation practices.

CreativeCulture Seminar, Sarawak, Malaysia. 2018
Creativity and resilience is at the core of what we do. Over the years our team has fostered a frugal approach to education innovation; merging playful learning with creative problem-solving to deliver innovative, practical, and sustainable pedagogic practice within our projects.
We embrace openness and believe everyone should be able to benefit from our efforts. To that end, we endeavour to make all our designs, resources, and research open access; complete with guides and examples of real-world implementations to help you re-use, re-share, or remix through the power of Creative Commons. Learn more about our frugal education work here!
We love what we do and we’re proud of the recognition we’ve received along the way.


Meet the Team.

Sylvester Arnab
Co-founder | Professor of Game Science
Researcher, designer, and practitioner of playful and gameful learning with a focus on the investigation into empathic design practices. Sylvester has published a book on ‘Game Science in Hybrid Learning Spaces’, which provides insights into the research and practice of purposeful game design with a focus on hybrid education.

Jayne Beaufoy
Senior Project Manager: Applied Innovation
Senior Project Manager with over twenty years experience and a proven track record of managing Research Projects in the Higher Education sector, providing a high level of service to internal and external customers achieved by building strong professional relationships.

Alex Masters
Co-founder | Innovation Technologist
Innovation Technologist, designer, and practice-based researcher of frugal education. My interests focus on the intersection of innovation, education, and sustainability, with an emphasis on the benefits of frugal practice and the use of trailing-edge technologies to deliver creative, practical, and sustainable education.

Samantha Clarke
Assistant Professor of Design Futures
Practical developer and researcher of game-based learning and gamification in the educational environment. My research and interests are mainly in the area of curiosity, narrative, and puzzle-led games that include escape rooms, D&D, mystery boxes, and choose-your-own-adventure-style games.
