The Floor is Lava Appreciation Society: making play with SEND students

Posted on June 13th, 2024

Associate Director Toby Peach reflects on the creation of The Floor is Lava Appreciation Society, a secret agency created by SEND students at I Am Festival.

Coney are excellent at making secret agencies. It has been a big part of our history – and throughout the years many different versions of a Playful Secret Agency – fictional organisations who try to make the world slightly lovelier through play – have popped up. Recently, a brand new front of the PSA was opened – the Floor Is Lava Appreciation Society.

I recently worked with Maryam Shaharuddin at Queensmill Trust to develop a game with seven young people, aged 12-15, from a SEND school in Fulham. We did this thanks to support from A New Direction to make something for their I AM Festival.

We wanted to create a game that would help us to understand what the young people wanted to change in their world, and to reflect some of the qualities they believed humans who want to make the world better would have – and we only had four sessions to do it! 

We haven’t used this model in SEND schools previously, and we were keen to understand how the young people would engage with the game-making process and the chance to create their own secret agency front together. 

Over four sessions, we explored what the group all had in common (we all liked the game The Floor Is Lava!); we talked about the games we like and what makes a good game; and then we talked about how we can modify games together to make them accessible to different players. We then started to explore what sort of people might be part of a secret agency that is trying to make the world better – what values you might need to have – and then began to make mini-games that could test players on whether they had these qualities. We built the world of our ‘front’ organisation, its history, its rivals, and the agents part of it.

This thinking and exploration was poured into the game that was produced as part of I AM Festival and presented at Kensington Palace for students from three SEND schools. There, we introduced The Floor Is Lava Appreciation Society. 

Our game began with an introduction to The Floor Is Lava Appreciation Society from one of the agents – i.e., one of the seven young people we’d been working with – before they revealed the truth of why they had invited young people to Kensington Palace. They are a Playful Secret Agency trying to make the world a better place, but are worried about another organisation – wonderfully named FREEZE (FOREVER RECRUITING EVIL ENERGY ZEN ENTHUSIASTS) – who want to destroy the world. So, they are looking to recruit new members (agents). The players must complete five Lava Agent tests to discover the secret room in the palace where they will join the agency. 

And off the young people went, in small groups, to complete their challenges. 

The first challenge was kindness – an Agent must be kind to join The Floor Is Lava Appreciation Society. Players discovered a character with a blue hat, who was feeling sad and needed cheering up. As a group they needed to decide how best to show kindness to this person. 

Next up, an Agent must be curious about their world. They entered a room where they needed to be curious about each other and the space they were in; answering questions as a group and hunting for answers in the space. 

Potential Agents’ creativity was then tested. They were posed a tricky question from a current Agent: what is your DREAM Happy Meal Toy? I know – it is a tricky choice. 

After a plethora of brilliant answers, players then headed into the fourth challenge, designed to test their loyalty. After being given a phone displaying a picture of something in the room, one player was tasked with describing that object without using certain words. Could the group find the object in the room? And could they do it without cheating? They all passed this challenge.

In the final room, the drawing room of Kensington Palace where kings and queens have held huge parties, we tested their teamwork with a series of riddles to decipher together. Solving each riddle revealed a letter that revealed the codeword – MAGMA – to a secret room. After gaining entry, players were inducted to The Floor Is Lava Appreciation Society from their illustrious leader, Magmanimus, and created their own Agent Cards.

But wait, reports of FREEZE Agents nearby meant Agents had to sneak out of the palace onto the front lawn for a final game. This was a dramatic face-off with two FREEZE Agents who wanted to play them at their own game, MEGA FLOOR IS LAVA (an accessible version of the game we made with students). 

It all culminated in success, of course, and we were so pleased with the response from the players. However, the most rewarding aspect was the students we had worked with having their games brought to life in Kensington Palace. Seeing how they responded when their games were being played by others was fantastic. We hope the creativity of making a game is something they will hold onto, as well as the values of the Playful Secret Agency that they wonderfully crafted, that can make the world a lovelier place. I know that if we had more people part of The Floor Is Lava Appreciation Society in the world, we’d be a lot better off.