our Playground is a year-long creative program for students aged 13 to 15 who are curious about storytelling, design, and making something of their own from start to finish. Open to young people from any background located anywhere in the world, the program offers mentorship and guidance through every stage of independent publishing from developing ideas and writing stories to designing pages, taking photographs, and producing a final magazine. It’s a space to explore creativity in many forms, work collaboratively as part of a team, and experience the reward of seeing an original idea come to life in print.
The program is structured across two semesters. Semester One will run from 1 January to 31 April 2026, and Semester Two from 1 August to 30 November 2025. Students are expected to dedicate between 6 to 8 hours each week to the magazine. This will include 2 hours of live, online classes and 4 to 6 hours of independent work completed in their own time. Classes will be held on either a Saturday or Sunday, conducted virtually on the interactive platform Gather.town.
The program is open to students between of age 13 to 15. Participants will need reliable access to the internet and a working laptop for the duration of the program, both for attending live classes and for completing independent work. Students will also be required to install Figma and Gather on their devices, both of which are free, easy-to-use applications that will be central to the program’s collaborative and design sessions.
Over the course of two semesters, students will have the opportunity to learn the following:
Ideation and Conceptualisation: An introduction to generating ideas, developing a magazine concept, and finding strong, original ideas within the given theme to shape the publication.
Photography: Lesson on using images to tell stories, exploring framing, composition, sequencing, and the relationship between text and photographs.
Creative Writing: A workshop-based space for experimenting with short stories, personal essays, and imaginative forms of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and script writing amongst other forms.
Journalism: An introduction to interviewing, research, and reportage, with a focus on writing about people, places, and everyday life.
Literature: Close readings and discussions of short texts that offer different ways of thinking about storytelling, memory, voice, and image-making.
Design: Lessons on designing pages and spreads using Figma, covering layout, typography, visual hierarchy, and creative problem-solving.
Bookmaking: An overview of how publications come together, including editing, proofing, preparing files for print, and understanding basic production processes.