Prasad Sandbhor
Playful Learning at York Administrator

Profile

Biography

Prasad is a serious game designer and researcher with experience designing games for learning, healthcare, social safety, sustainability, and science outreach across digital, tabletop, and hybrid platforms. He is the co-founder of the Play in Nature initiative, which creates playful experiences that connect people with nature.

He is currently working as the Administrator for the Playful Learning at York (PLaY) Group. The PLaY Group aims to bring together individuals interested in using or creating playful methods, provide guidance and support on development and intellectual property, facilitate access to research and industry funding, and act as a broker for distributing research and educational tools created at York. 

Prasad is also completing his PhD in Intelligent Games and Games Intelligence (iGGi). As part of his research, he has developed Thinking Through, a framework for designing contextual role-playing games to support understanding of climate actions. Prior to his PhD journey, he worked in user experience design, where he established and led design teams to develop both B2C and B2B digital products for organisations in India and internationally.

In addition to his professional and research work, Prasad teaches serious game design and user experience design. He also enjoys writing short stories and essays in his native language, Marathi.

Research

Overview

Prasad's research focuses on designing and evaluating serious games. He has created research-based games, including:

- Future Factory (2024) - A role-playing card game aimed at supporting envisioning the sustainable future of manufacturing for the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC).
- Urban Labour-a-tree: York (2025) - A York-focused collaborative board game about developing urban treescapes while meeting the needs of distinct stakeholders such as urban planners, ecologists, activists, and citizens. alongside Joanne Morris, researcher from the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), under the discipline-hopping scheme by the York Environmental Sustainability Initiative (YESI)
- Birds in the City: Bengaluru Edition (2025) - A collaborative board game that examines the relationship between urbanisation and bird diversity, designed as part of the Play in Nature initiative.

Through his PhD research, Prasad has developed and evaluated two role-playing games centred on climate actions - 'Climate Club', a tabletop role-playing game that addresses challenges related to climate action decision-making within everyday constraints and 'Climate Companions', a mini live-action role-playing game (LARP) that involves planning a climate-friendly holiday. From the insights gained through these two evaluations, Prasad has developed 'Thinking Through', a framework for designing contextual role-playing games aimed at enhancing understanding of climate actions. This framework identifies game elements that influence players' ability to comprehend climate actions and serves as design guidelines for researchers, designers, and educators in the fields of climate change education and communication.

Publications

Selected publications

Lynda Dunlop, Emerson Joucoski, and Prasad Sandbhor. 2025. Learning through play? What board games reveal and conceal about climate change. Environmental Education Research, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2025.2581112

Prasad Sandbhor and Jonathan Hook. 2024. Climate Club: A Group-based Game to Support Sensemaking of Climate Actions. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 32, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3649921.3649998

Prasad Sandbhor, Priti Bangal, Deepti Aggarwal, and Rohit Ashok Khot. 2021. Life on Wings: Relating to a Bird's Life in a City through a Board Game. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 5, CHI PLAY, Article 232 (September 2021), 28 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3474659

Prasad Sandbhor and Priti Bangal. 2018. Game System based on Mixed-species Bird Flocks: A Science Outreach Approach. In Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts (CHI PLAY '18 Extended Abstracts). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 595–601. https://doi.org/10.1145/3270316.3271509

External activities

Invited talks and conferences

Designing Impactful Local Games for Science Communication and Outreach: Insights from 'Birds in the City: Bengaluru Edition' - talk at the Arab Forum of Science Media and Communication - Public Communications of Science and Technology (AFSMC-PCST) Symposium, 3-4 February 2026, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

Decoding Urban Labor-a-Tree: Envisioning Urban Treescapes through a Boardgame - talk at the iGGiCon, 10 September, 2025, York, United Kingdom

Climate Club: A Group-based Game to Support Sensemaking of Climate Actions - talk at the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG), 21-24 May, 2024, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA