Play as mediator for knowledge-creation in Problem Based Learning

This article recounts a small group of students’ and their supervisor’s reflections on play utilized at their meetings and as part of a Problem Based Learning (PBL) process. The students’ experienced how a more untraditional professor-student relationship rose and transformed how they interacted and related to each other to a more holistic, trustful, sensitive, open, creative and collaborative form, which gave rise to the following wondering: What is it a playful approach can bring into the learning-space, relationship and collaboration between students and their supervisor in a PBL process? Why did the students find that this experience enhanced a different learning form, from the one they knew from their earlier PBL processes? What was it the playful approach to PBL as a learning method had mediated? The article leads on to a distinction and a model encircling three different knowledge forms based on respectively PBL as a problem-solving approach to learning and PpBL (Play and Problem Based Learning) where a more playful, experimenting and intuitive approach to PBL is utilized.