Our UK schoolchildren may be some of the least happy in Europe, according to repeated surveys. A diet of tests and chasing the elusive benefits of "imposed incrementalism" may be a part of that. Some schools teach unremittingly to the tests, and the tests are frequent.
It's not just our children, of course: talking to a headteacher as part of an inclusion research project in Hong Kong, I asked what future learning might aspire to be like there.
"Surely," she said, "there might be a little more joy?"
And technology is one very effective way of reintroducing, that joy. Secondary age children mourn the loss of play from their primary years and yet play is something that ICT has been bringing into learning from the very beginning. ICT in learning holds the potential to bring back playfulness and engagement and in 2010, finally, it will be doing just that.
Since those earliest days of Space Invaders the dream of engaging children in learning as fully as they are evidently engaged in games has been a significant part of ICT events everywhere. But the whole debate has become a lot more complex: our understanding of cognitive development tells us more clearly than before how the problem-solving of games can help other learning tasks too; children playing games at the beginning of their day can jump start a whole cultural change in school so that "being brainy is cool"; children as games designers learn to deconstruct and critique new media; and of course the design of new learning environments, of hardware and software, is now embracing the need for playfulness too. Finally, we really know that playful learning is highly effective.
This year, one of Bett's central features, in association with Heppell.net, is playful learning. Play, of course, has escaped from its boxes and much of it now uses GPS trackers, handheld and pocketable devices, collaborative teams, international links and more. It will involve a host of play-based activity - with plenty of screens and a whole class of children from Lampton school, a humanities specialist college in Hounslow, Middlesex, who will be playing, learning, challenging, tweeting and provoking Bett guests, using a diversity of hardware, software, devices and ideas.
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.
At this year's Bett, we hope you can be a part of it.
Professor Stephen Heppell heads his own policy, research and practice consultancy, Heppell.net
