#700: Learning through Partnerships: How Co-Design and Embodied Play Can Shape a Playful Learning Ecology

What happens when teachers and researchers partner to co-design a tangible, embodied game to foster computational thinking? Byte Beads is a game in which children compose and perform sequences of beads associated with actions to represent computational patterns. Initially conceived within computing education, the game evolved as teachers helped shape a design supporting pattern-based reasoning, collaborative embodied sequencing, and executive functioning skills, including attention and cognitive flexibility. Drawing on constructionist and embodied learning traditions, we examine how researcher-practitioner partnerships shaped the evolution of the game and the pedagogical practices surrounding it. Tracing these interactions across relational collaborations, professional development, and classroom enactment, the paper illustrates how partnership itself becomes a site of learning where design, pedagogy and play co-develop. This work contributes to the ISLS 2026 theme of Partnerships with Purpose by conceptualizing partnership as an ongoing process of co-designing and sustaining environments supporting playful embodied learning.