Hey Reader of the Play Book Ensemble story!

What happens when you connect enthusiastic Brigadiers across borders and time zones on a foggy, shiny, rainy or freakin’ hot day for weekly meetings to enthusiastically brainstorm on what a GPB Play Book could be? Not surprisingly, our process is filled with playful and creative souls who generate tons of ideas. Should we create Play-Superheroes and spread them around the world via comics and Brigadiers dressed in costume? Or perhaps an app with Daily E(motional) Dance moves incorporated into a HoliDaily holiday? Or, maybe we create a Play Calendar incorporating world holidays? Could we break down walls in physical spaces such as schools to bring play into the classroom? Should create something new, or rather bring GPB to existing platforms, systems, or influencers spaces?

So many possibilities – it's almost overwhelming! Thankfully, we had Executive Director Rita Ezenwa-Okoro to focus this creative bunch. Rita focused and steered us to move one or two of our ideas to implementation and launch! This is how we narrowed down the process to focus on building The Play Generator.

The Play Generator will eventually be accessed via our GPB website. It will be a platform that allows people to search for playful activities and games based on their needs. After someone comes to the site and inputs a basic set of criteria, the Play Generator will show a play activity that meets that person’s criteria. For example, a teacher who wants to bring play into their middle school classroom.

As a playful social change movement we have tons of play activities to spread and share around the world. We’re excited to put these rich resources into a web application. We’ve put out a call on Idealist.org for volunteers to come on board as volunteer Play Generator Programmers; we are also going to look for a volunteer Project Manager. Together with our team, they will lead the development, coding and launch of our Play Generator.

Imagine having a tool where anyone anywhere in the world could input simple parameters and receive a game tailored to that person’s needs We will also put in a feedback loop so that we can find out how it went!

Do you want to put some energy in making this happen for real? We call on our Brigadiers to keep on nourishing the resources by cataloguing your games. Let's play it forward.

And lastly, we use every opportunity together to play! Here we are playing a virtual Hide and Seek game. (Hikaru is hidden, see if you can find her!)