2026 Play Make Learn Conference: Call for Proposals Now Open

Presentation proposals are now open for the 2026 Play Make Learn Conference.

The Play Make Learn Conference is a place for collaboration and discovery in the design, research and practice of playful learning, games for learning and positive social impact, making and makerspaces, STEAM education, and arts in education. PML creates an inspirational space for preK-12 educators, designers, developers, innovators, librarians, museum professionals, makers, and researchers to tinker together, share knowledge, and celebrate one another’s work.

The Play Make Learn Conference will be held July 9-10, 2026, in Madison, WI. The deadline for proposal submissions is March 9, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. (Central Time). Proposal notifications will be sent in April 2026. Submit your proposal at go.wisc.edu/PMLsubmit.

This year, Play Make Learn invites talks and workshops that engage with the attitude of scrappiness, with projects that get scrapped, and with literal scraps. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Scrappy educator mindset, passion, and burnout
• New approaches to failure in play and education
• Quilting, scrapbooking, and other feminized arts of collage
• Recycling, composting, and other ecological approaches to waste
• Using and contributing to open access resources
• Failed community projects and what it means to end them
• Cardboard
• Junk, treasure, and other things that have lost their use
• The institutional consequences of making ends meet
• Media in fragments (Tweets, Wikis, TikTok)
• Little free libraries, tool exchanges, and other community sharing
• Rethinking tinkering and hacking today
• The lost-and-found, scrapyards, scrapbins, and other dislocations
• Archiving and preserving the remnants
• Game jams and other art projects that don’t go anywhere

Session Strands: Submissions are encouraged in and across the following themes, but new ideas are also welcome and encouraged. You will be asked to select all themes that apply to your work. Examples include:

• Playful learning
• Games for learning and positive social impact
• Making and makerspaces
• STEAM education
• Arts in education

Session Formats: You will be asked to select the session format. Please note time and maximum presenters for each type. Options include:

• Hands-on Workshops (75 minutes, 1-6 presenters)
  • Workshops should actively engage participants, showcasing your work, or methods you use inside or outside the classroom. They may include physical making, playing a game or something else. Session Organizers will be asked for 2-3 learning goals or takeaways they have for participants in the session.

• Organized Panel Presentation (75 minutes, 3-4 presentations)
  • Panel presentations should have two or more presenters from different projects or organizations. Panels should explore a “big question” relevant to the conference theme or of interest to the larger PML community. Session Organizers will be asked for 2-3 learning goals or takeaways they have for participants in the session, a short description of the full session, as well as descriptions of the 3-4 presentations which will make up the full session.

• Individual Presentation (15 minutes, 1-2 presenters)
  • Presentations will be 15 minutes in length to highlight noteworthy initiatives, ideas, or recent research. Session Organizers will be asked for 1 learning goal or takeaways they have for participants from their presentation. The planning committee will group individual presentations into themed 75 minute sessions with a moderator, who will reach out to coordinate the final format with presenters.

• Poster
  • Posters provide the opportunity to present innovative ideas, initiatives, and prototypes in both formal and informal learning contexts. Presenters will have space to hang their poster and engage with attendees during the interactive poster & playful demo session.

• Playful Demo
  • This interactive, open-ended session is a chance to show off or playtest a game, ed tech tool, or other innovation. Presenters will have a table for their activity or tool during the interactive poster & playful demo session.

• Break the Mold Session
  • Have an idea that doesn’t quite fit into the formats listed above? Samples include sessions lasting days or weeks asynchronously, sessions within games, and so on. What if a session took place in Minecraft? What if participants met outside to explore? What if participants worked collaboratively over the conference to produce a play? Be as creative as you dare for these sessions. If you have questions about an idea before submitting, send an email to conferences@education.wisc.edu.

Note: In the interest of providing diverse perspectives any individual will be limited to participating in a maximum of two sessions. Posters and Arcade Demos do not count towards this maximum. Sessions should focus on new insights, learnings, and innovations of broad interest to the PML community and should not be promotional in nature.

If you are a for-profit company interested in showcasing your product to the PML audience, please reach out to conferences@education.wisc.edu for sponsorship opportunities.