Student Success Snakes and Ladders - activity introduction and instructions

This University of Kent educational development resource is created and shared by Dr Yetunde Kolajo (Research Associate) and Lucy Panesar (Lecturer in Higher Education).  

The resource presents the University of Kent Student Success Snakes and Ladders activity. For the activity, staff play the Snakes and Ladder game and are prompted to read bespoke snake and ladder cards as they land on these on the board. The snake and ladder cards present scenarios that explain the set back or advancement. These scenarios are derived from University of Kent longitudinal research into the experience of 25 Academic Excellence Scholarship students by Dr Alex Hensby, Dr Barbara Adewumi and Dr Yetunde Kolajo (2024). Additional scenarios are provided by Lee Fellows, Deputy Director of Student Services and Head of Student Support and Wellbeing.  

Snakes and Ladders is a game of chance and for this activity, it represents the student's journey through academic life with its unexpected ups and downs. The bespoke snake and ladder cards, designed and printed by the University of Kent Design and Print Centre, are intended to help staff understand factors inhibiting and enabling student success. Additional blank ‘catch’ cards are included for staff to propose interventions to mitigate any snakes and enable students to progress. The activity is an example of ‘serious play’ (Rieber, Smith and Noah, 1998) that presents the real-life situations of Kent students to promote staff understanding and to prompt solution/action-oriented thinking and discussion.  

The resource is shared on the National Teaching Repository under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC license. This enables users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the resource in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to Dr Yetunde Kolajo and Lucy Panesar as the creators. 

For more information about the activity and card scenarios, please contact:  

Y.Kolajo@kent.ac.uk or L.Panesar@kent.ac.uk 

For more information about the AES Longitudinal Research, please visit:  

https://www.kent.ac.uk/student-success/research/aes-longitudinal    

Please use this MS form to feedback on the resource anonymously: 

https://forms.office.com/e/Bg1362D310