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Competitions are widely used in higher education and industry to stimulate innovation and engagement, yet they are rarely examined through the lens of games-based learning. This paper conceptualises competitive design challenges as structured playful environments, where rules, roles and feedback mechanisms shape participation and learning. The study draws on the Enhancing Science Education through International Collaboration (ESEIC) project, a multi-institutional initiative involving universities in the UK, Indonesia and Kazakhstan. Students are invited to design a prototype website to support international collaboration and community engagement, producing both a front-end prototype and an accompanying design report. A distinctive feature of the competition is the use of international student panels as first-stage reviewers, positioning learners as both participants and evaluators. Adopting a design-based research approach, the paper examines how competition structures and student-led evaluation function as mechanisms of playful pedagogy. Analysis draws on competition submissions, participant responses, rubric-based evaluation and the collective judging process, providing early evidence of engagement with comparison, criteria and evaluative judgement. The paper argues that competitions can be understood as pedagogical systems in which evaluation operates as a core mechanic. By integrating student-led evaluation, the design aligns participation, critique and application, contributing to discussions of games-based learning, authentic assessment and inclusive assessment in international and interdisciplinary contexts.

The 2023 Foundation Year Network conference focused on an important theme: failures, mistakes, missteps and meanders in the foundation year context. It provided an important impetus for reflection: after all, the relative institutional ‘success’ of a programme of study will often be judged on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative data collected from, or about, students studying on the programme, for example, attainment, progression, and satisfaction. It is, therefore, too easy to overlook how the teaching staff view the processes, iterations, and risks taken in designing, teaching, assessing and iteratively improving programmes of study which are deemed successful within product-oriented metrics, achieved only through reflection on the intervening failures, mistakes, missteps and meanders by the ‘insiders’. Herein, we detail a case study on a core component of our foundation year programme, the ‘Conference Project’, and provide a narrative on how it has iteratively developed, why specific decisions were taken, and the next iteration currently in development. The challenges of operational restraints and the triad of tensions between the expectations of teachers, students, and the academy will likely resonate with our colleagues’ experiences, or, at the very least, highlight some pitfalls to be avoided.