Curso de formación Facilitators' playground
(21-28 enero 2026), estonia
Entre el 21 y el 28 de enero de 2026 tuvo lugar en Estonia el curso de formación Facilitators’ Playground, organizado por Shokkin, una asociación activa desde hace varios años en el ámbito del trabajo juvenil y especializada sobre todo en juegos educativos y en la gamificación de actividades. Stefano, participante en el curso, nos contó así su experiencia:
«Recently I participated in a Training Course organised by the association Shokkin, based in Tallinn, Estonia. The project, called Facilitator’s playground, was about game facilitation and game-based education, and aimed to make participants discover “how to be effective game masters, guide players smoothly through different educational game formats (escape games, tabletop games, live action role-play), and conduct meaningful debriefings that turn play into learning”.
It took place at the end of January, first next to a village called Vihi, where we spent five days in a beautiful venue nested between the stunning frozen streams and the silent forest trails of central Estonia, and then in Tallinn, where we had the chance to visit the office and spaces of the association. It was a great experience, and a chance to learn a lot and find much inspiration for the future. In the days of the project, together with the 28 participants who came from many European countries, we discussed and learned about the potentials of game-based learning, we explored the role of a game master, we reviewed the steps to create effective educational games, we reflected about the key to create meaningful debriefings… and next to this, we played an infinite amount of board games together :) We even got the chance to try an authentic Estonian sauna, and to visit the medieval center of Tallinn. It was a truly complete experience!
In the activities, we focused in particular on three types of games: tabletops, escape games (escape rooms and escape boxes) and roleplay (such as LARPs). This is because Shokkin, who has been active as an association for a long time focusing in particular on game-based education, has throughout the years created a long series of educational games that form part of these categories. In the project we had the chance to discover some of these games and facilitate them, receiving constructive feedback from the others. They can be found (and downloaded for free) from the website playversity.co, and they are a great tool to address very important topics (such as sustainability, bullying, media literacy, cybersecurity and more) in a way that is relevant, engaging and effective.
I am very grateful for the chance to take part in this project, and after this week I went back to Spain full of new ideas and with a strong desire to do more game-based activities in the future. I think games can be a great way to learn, because they teach us to be curious and proactive, to solve challenges and to overcome fears, to take the role of someone else and to be fully ourselves. They put us directly inside the situations, and they ask us to act in the best way we can. They teach us to accept (and even embrace) mistakes as a way to learn and improve. And there’s so much to learn from this.
Thank you Shokkin for these reflections, I will keep them with me in all the new games I’ll play. And thank you Ingalicia for giving me the chance to go there, to escape a bit from the rain just to end up in -15 degrees of cold, and to come back with so many new ideas inside my pockets».
The project was implemented by Shokkin Group Estonia and funded by the Estonian National Agency Noorteagentuur under the Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission.
