play for all accelerator
where it started
the story of the winded.vertigo collective shares many roots. while working for the LEGO Foundation, garrett and maria met and played together with jamie (he worked with nasen at the time) on the Play for All Accelerator.
Play for All was the LEGO Foundation’s initiative to make digital play experiences more inclusive and accessible for children with disabilities. the programme brought together ed-tech companies, disability organisations, and learning design experts to co-develop products that centre the needs of the most marginalised learners first — and benefit all children as a result.
our roles
jamie consulted many of the teams on universal design and how to develop more inclusive programming and interfaces. his background in inclusive education meant he could bridge the gap between accessibility standards and the messy, joyful reality of how children actually play. he helped teams move beyond compliance checklists toward genuinely inclusive design thinking.
garrett and maria consulted on designing for learning through play and how to design responsibly for the wellbeing of children. they brought a developmental lens — asking not just “is this fun?” but “does this support the kind of playful learning that leads to growth?” together they helped teams think about challenge calibration, emotional safety, and the difference between engagement and genuine learning.
the three of them harmonised on how to leverage developmental appropriateness of learning experiences to challenge learners in games — finding the sweet spot where play is accessible enough to welcome everyone and challenging enough to keep them growing.
the ripple effect
the accelerator ran across multiple cohorts and geographies, supporting teams building everything from literacy apps to therapeutic games. for garrett, maria, and jamie, the experience crystallised something they’d each felt separately: that the most powerful learning design happens at the intersection of play, inclusion, and rigorous developmental thinking.
and now, they get to play together all the time as part of the winded.vertigo collective. the values they practised at Play for All — design with (not for), start with the margins, make it playful — became the DNA of everything w.v does.
what we learned
inclusion isn’t a feature you bolt on at the end — it’s a design posture you adopt from the first sketch. the teams that made the most progress were the ones that brought children with disabilities into the design process early, not as testers but as co-designers.
we also learned that “play for all” doesn’t mean “the same play for everyone.” the best inclusive designs offered multiple pathways — different ways to engage, different levels of challenge, different modalities — so every child could find their way in.