The Play-Create-Learn Summer Academy 2018 aims to help educators from around Europe to experiment with, and reflect on, aspects and uses of innovative playful and creative learning activities in classrooms and beyond, with an eye to addressing the needs of today's students as tomorrow's citizens in the 'brave new world' of the 21st century.

The Academy offers a flexible modular professional development course, which has been specifically designed to address every participant's need to adapt the training to their own interests and teaching realities. Next to a core course element on the basic concepts and options for creativity in education and playful and game-based learning, participants are given a selection of practical case studies to choose from in order to build their own path from the theory to teaching practice. To this end, the course includes hands-on workshops offering multiple insights into research and real-life innovative teaching activities from the context of successful European projects such as C2Learn, eCrisis, ENVISAGE, and GAIA, as well as international initiatives such as Unity for Education.

Presentations and conceptual discussions on the opportunities and challenges for 21st-century pedagogy based on play, gaming and creativity in classrooms and other learning spaces will be followed by practical workshops and hands-on sessions on:

• Games for co-creativity in education: students generating valuable, disruptive new ideas to address problems they define (the C2Learn case study)
• Game-based inclusive education in times of crisis: fostering students' skills in conflict resolution, creative thinking, and reflective debate (the eCrisis case study)
• Game authoring and analytics to enhance learning: optimizing learning through user behaviour data analysis informing the design and adaptation of virtual labs (the ENVISAGE case study)
• Playful pursuit of energy efficiency in schools: using gamification and data from the school building to promote efficient use of energy in schools (the GAIA case study)
• Game creation at school: students and teachers as creative game makers at schools - game design and development skills for the successful creators of tomorrow (the Unity for Education case study).

The repertoire of good educational practices and tools that will be presented, in combination with the strong hands-on and design-oriented nature of the course, will provide participating educators with new knowledge, skills and inspiring ideas on how to introduce playful and creative learning activites in their own school environments and everyday teaching practice.

In addition, participants will get to know state-of-the-art ways of sharing ideas and work within a wide European community of educational practice, by consulting, and contributing to, relevant European educational repositories and communities.