PLAYLAB aims to strengthen the quality, innovation, and professional recognition of youth work practice by developing youth workers’ competences to intentionally design, facilitate, and reflect on playful and experiential learning processes. At its core, PLAYLAB is about rediscovering play as a universal, deeply human way of learning and growing. Play is an innate mode through which people explore the world, relate to others, test boundaries, and make meaning. While it is naturally present in childhood, it is often lost, instrumentalised, or underestimated in adulthood and professional contexts. PLAYLAB invites youth workers to reconnect with this natural learning language and to consciously translate it into ethical, inclusive, and meaningful youth work practice. Across Europe, play is widely used in youth work, yet often only with the purpose of energising or entertaining young people, practiced intuitively and without clear learning intentions, ethical framing, or structured reflection. This limits its educational potential and weakens the professional recognition of youth work as a serious non-formal learning field. PLAYLAB addresses this gap by transforming how youth workers understand and apply play: from isolated activities to conscious learning architectures grounded in experiential education, group dynamics, inclusion, and reflection. From a youth work practice perspective, the project pursues the following objectives: - To professionalise the use of play and games as intentional educational tools that foster learning, participation, cooperation, emotional awareness, and inclusion among young people. - To strengthen youth workers’ facilitation competences, including reading group processes, adapting methods to diverse groups, balancing challenge and safety, and guiding meaningful debriefing and transfer. - To equip youth workers with shared theoretical frameworks and language (experiential learning cycle, ethical facilitation, challenge by choice, flow, group development), enabling them to justify their methods to colleagues, organisations, parents, and local stakeholders. - To support youth workers in moving from activity-based programming to learning-oriented practice, where experiences are intentionally designed, reflected upon, and linked to real-life youth contexts. - To increase innovation capacity in youth work organisations by creating a safe learning environment where experimentation, testing, adaptation, and peer feedback are normalised professional practices rather than risks. - To strengthen youth workers’ wellbeing and sustainability of practice by reconnecting them with embodied, outdoor, and screen-free learning, offering a strategic digital detox that supports presence, self-regulation, and resilience — competences they can later model for young people. - To enhance inclusion and equity in youth work by supporting youth workers to adapt playful methods for young people with fewer opportunities, different learning styles, cultural backgrounds, and confidence levels. - To contribute to the recognition of youth work at European level by aligning learning outcomes with the ETS competence framework and the Key Competences for Lifelong Learning, and by embedding Youthpass as a reflective and professional development tool. Through PLAYLAB, youth workers are supported to move through a scaffolded learning process — from learners, to practitioners, to designers of learning — enabling them to return to their organisations not only with new methods, but as confident professionals capable of designing high-quality, ethical, and impactful learning experiences for young people, using play as a powerful and fully professional educational approach.