FUTURE PROOF YOUR TEACHING
The future of education isn’t about technology—it’s about teaching.
Education is changing faster than ever. And in a profession where the only constant is constant change, today’s educators need more than just another tool, trend, or tech-powered platform to keep up. They need a playbook for lasting impact—one that embraces innovation while staying true to what matters most: human connection, creativity, and engagement.
That’s where Playing with Purpose comes in.
This Power-Packed Playbook blends cutting-edge research and real-world classroom strategies to help teachers harness the power of playful pedagogy in the face of uncertainty. Whether navigating Universal Design for Learning, creativity, AI, or ethics, this book goes beyond surface-level engagement to deliver a timeless, adaptable framework that works across all grade levels, subjects, and technologies—past, present, or future.
CHAPTER 1.1
Candy Bar Challenge
Let your students enjoy the sweet fun of free association with The Candy Bar Challenge! Without needing a single piece of candy, this activity inspires students to write as many creative, content-driven sentences as possible, incorporating famous candy names into their answers. This lighthearted challenge sharpens their content knowledge while adding a playful twist to any lesson.
CHAPTER 1.2
The Amazin' Online Marketplace
Students design a fictional “product” related to your unit of study and create their very own Amazon-style product pages right inside of in Google Slides! Each team crafts a full product portfolio, featuring key sections like a product description, Q&A, related items, and customer reviews. This activity taps into real-world media literacy and content mastery, making learning fun, purposeful, and collaborative.
CHAPTER 1.3
AlphaBLAST
In AlphaBLAST, student teams must “blast away” a board of letters—one at a time—by coming up with relevant, content-based words that start with each letter. Each word must connect to a Secret Mission (a unit-aligned topic), and students must be prepared to justify their choices if ever they are called into question. With layers of gameplay variety, this fast-paced activity fosters collaboration, quick thinking, and deep content connections.
CHAPTER 2.1
Coins for Content
Turn your classroom into a dynamic financial challenge! In Coins for Content, students work within a set “budget” to create answers that maximize their learning. Inspired by real-world decision-making, this activity challenges students to prioritize valuable information and make thoughtful trade-offs, all while staying under budget.
CHAPTER 2.2
Swatch What Happens
In Swatch What Happens, students reimagine your course content as a themed lineup of colors—whether it’s nail polishes, crayons, paint samples, or fabric swatches. Each shade must have a clever name tied to the subject matter and include a rationale that explains its connection. This activity encourages all kinds of creativity, deepens content understanding, and adds a colorful twist to any unit!
CHAPTER 2.3
Caveman Grammar
Travel back to the Stone Age and spark the fires of curiosity with Caveman Grammar! Inspired by the game “Poetry for Neanderthals,” this no prep activity challenges students to explain complex concepts using only single-syllable words. It’s the perfect blend of simplicity and strategy that will light a spark of laughter and learning in your classroom.
CHAPTER 3.1
Get to Know Me Empathy Maps
Transform one-on-one meetings into meaningful and imaginative experiences with Get to Know Me Empathy Maps! This dynamic graphic organizer helps teachers uncover each student’s unique interests, strengths, and needs across academic, social-emotional, and career domains. Whether used as a conversation starter during goal-setting or reimagined digitally, this activity helps build trust, empathy, and actionable goals. Want to take it a step further? Use AI tools to generate personalized visuals of these very students stepping into their dream roles—giving them the chance to literally see themselves as an astronaut, an archaeologist, or anything they can imagine!
CHAPTER 3.2
Storytelling with Scrabble
Transform the classic game of Scrabble into a powerful tool for self-expression! Students use all 100 tiles—or as many as they can—to fill the board with words that tell their unique story. And since we’re making up new rules for a more inclusive way to play, they are free to spell words in any direction, even upside-down or backward, as long as every word connects to something meaningful about them. Whether they’re sharing hobbies, dreams, favorite memories, or quirks, students will surprise you with how much they reveal when serious work feels like anything but.
CHAPTER 3.3
Sticker Swag Soiree
Let your students’ personalities shine with a Sticker Swag Soiree! Whether your class is full of students with laptops already covered in stickers or you’re in a school where devices need to stay clean, this activity is adaptable and bursting with creative potential. Students with decorated laptops can share the stories behind their stickers, while those with blank devices (or loaners) can design a laptop cover of their dream using a blank slideshow.
CHAPTER 4.1
Resource Rumble
Think of eight different activities your students can complete to show what they know about your current unit of study. These can include listing facts, defining vocab words, or drawing pictures — anything goes! The catch? Each task should be repeatable, with no finite number of “correct” submissions. Get the picture? Give a click and you’re ready to rumble!
CHAPTER 4.2
Save Our Students
Dust off your trusty worksheets or graphic organizers and scan them into a single shared slide deck, turning your classroom into a mystery-packed team challenge. Inspired by the hit mobile game Among Us, students must work together to complete all tasks in a collaborative deck while identifying sneaky saboteurs before time runs out.
CHAPTER 4.3
Collab Collect
You don’t need to teach a STEM class to bring an exciting engineering twist to your lessons. Collab Collect is a perfect icebreaker or a content-driven challenge that works any time of year. Whether your goal is fostering teamwork, sparking creativity, or reinforcing curriculum concepts, this quick, simple, and endlessly adaptable activity will quickly become a staple in your teacher toolkit.
CHAPTER 5.1
Double Bubble Balancing Act
Introduce your students to the Double Bubble Balancing Act—a lively and visual twist on a classic compare-and-contrast activity. Double Bubble Charts (a type of thinking map) help students organize similarities and differences between two concepts, but in this version, it’s all about balance and strategy. Teams must add as many bubbles as they can while ensuring each difference has a perfectly matched counterpoint on the other side of the diagram. And for each new branch you add on one side of the diagram, you’ll need to add something that is equivalent in type and kind on the other. It’s a hilarious mental workout that will have students analyzing, debating, and creatively balancing ideas in real-time.
CHAPTER 5.2
Pyramid Pass and Dash
Pyramid Pass and Dash empowers students with multiple ways to demonstrate their learning, promoting equity and engagement. Think of this as a mental AMRAP (As Many Reps as Possible), but instead of burpees or squats, students are racing against the clock to climb up and down a series of pyramids, completing different mental “exercises” at each level. And here’s the best part: YOU choose the core menu of activities, and your students get to choose how many times they tackle these obstacles (and in what order) again, and again, and again.
CHAPTER 5.3
Twelve Topic Stitch-Up
Concept mapping is an incredible tool for helping students visualize connections between ideas. In this gamified twist, teams work collaboratively to connect concepts while racing to earn attempts at a high-energy hands-on challenge inspired by the classic Operation board game. Don’t have an Operation board? No problem! The game can easily be adapted as a “point-scoring” activity where successful connections earn the team bragging rights instead of extractions—though the game board adds a whole new level of fun and excitement that’s so worth it.
CHAPTER 6.1
Happy Green Boxes
Writing can feel intimidating, but Happy Green Boxes turns the process into a dynamic, engaging experience that celebrates growth every step of the way, Wordle-style! In this activity, students work collaboratively in a shared Google Slides presentation, starting with neutral gray boxes representing each facet of their written submissions (these could be one box per sentence, one box per paragraph, or one box per question based on the needs of your lesson). As the activity progresses, teachers gradually provide real-time feedback simply by color-coding each box—shifting boxes where appropriate from gray to yellow to green.
CHAPTER 6.2
Pokévolve Trading Card Creator
Who says studying has to be boring? In the Pokévolve Trading Card Creator activity, students transform course content into colorful, collectible trading cards inspired by Pokémon-style evolution. Whether it’s a historical figure, a scientific concept, or a literary character, students illustrate growth and change over three distinct stages of evolution—each one showcasing their learning in creative, engaging ways.
CHAPTER 6.3
Hexagon Hunters
What if a page of printed material could become a massive, immersive game board? Hexagon Hunters makes it possible, empowering teachers to create custom oversized game boards using AI-powered image rasterization. By overlaying a simple hexagon grid onto any background (and then blowing up your image to a giant sized game board), teachers can design engaging, interactive review activities that blend learning with hands-on gameplay.
CHAPTER 7.1
Coin Crashers
Imagine your classroom transformed into a virtual trading floor where students act as rival investment firms competing in a highly volatile crypto market. Coin Crashers isn’t just a review activity—it’s an immersive backdrop for your course content that lets students collect, affect, and protect their investments while racing against the clock and their classmates.
And the best part is: setup is even easier than building out a slideshow with all of those Jeopardy questions! If you can create a single display slide like the one shown above, your cryptocurrency-inspired showdown is ready to play in any lesson plan of your choosing.
CHAPTER 7.2
Desert Island Dilemma
What if you had to choose between rescuing Benedict Arnold or Alexander Hamilton from a deserted island? Now imagine they’re saddled with quirky “baggage,” like one always mispronounces .gif and the other eats pineapple on pizza—or one will solve world hunger if you save them while the other might ruin your Spotify algorithm forever! Inspired by the off-the-shelf party game Superfight, Desert Island Dilemma adapts the fun and debate-filled mechanics into a classroom-friendly format that’s easy to replicate without needing to purchase the boxed game.
CHAPTER 7.3
AI Artwork Anarchy
What if your students could bring their learning to life using cutting-edge AI tools—or curated collections of AI-generated images—to visually represent and explain key concepts from your course? AI Artwork Anarchy invites students to create or select AI-generated images that capture the essence of what they’re studying, and then challenges them to defend their choices in a lively and thought-provoking classroom debate.
CHAPTER 8.1
Imagination Station
What happens when you mix paperclips, rubber bands, and a ticking clock? Welcome to the Imagination Station! Part makeshift makerspace, and part living laboratory for out-of-the-box thinking, this collaborative activity challenges students to use a random assortment of everyday items to creatively explain whatever concepts they’re studying. With a ticking timer and open-ended prompts, students will harness their collective imagination to explore, design, and present their ideas in ways only humans can dream up. From impromptu puppet shows to micro-sized reenactments, the possibilities are endless!
CHAPTER 8.2
Out of Sorts
Laugh while you learn with Out of Sorts, the wildest, most ridiculous sorting game you’ll ever play! Designed to spark laughter, creativity, and some serious outside-the-box thinking, this deceptively simple activity challenges students to classify everyday items into categories like Dog, Cat, Snake, Fish, Bird, or Horse—or whatever absurd options you come up with next! Starting with just two options, you’ll add layers of complexity with each round, pushing teams to stretch their imagination and logic in surprising ways.
CHAPTER 8.3
Schoolhouse Rock Stars
Ready to make some noise? Schoolhouse Rock Stars challenges your students to turn their course content into lyrical masterpieces, blending creativity, content knowledge, and a touch of tech if desired. Whether it’s a rock anthem about the periodic table or a country ballad dedicated to George Washington, this activity empowers students to compose original songs inspired by your curriculum… and then take the stage to bring their creations to life!
