TGfU was developed by Bunker and Thorpe and first published in 1982 and over the past decade interest in TGfU has grown enough or it to be described as a movement. This has lead a rise in variations of it shaped by their intended use and cultural contexts. These include Play Practice developed by Alan Launder (Australia), Game Sense (Australia), the Games Concept Approach (GCA-Singapore), and the Tactical Games Approach (USA) and it is to be expected that variations will develop as one model cannot be expected to fit all situations, needs and contexts. In his keynote address at the 2003 conference in Melbourne, Rod Thorpe suggested that Play Practice and TGfU were brothers but, in his invited address Alan Launder responded by saying that they were distant cousins at best. However, the connections between Game Sense and TGfU are undeniable. Game Sense was developed through collaboration between Rod Thorpe, the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) and local coaches in Australia during the nineteen nineties primarily for coaching and is less structured than TGfU.

 

As Rod Thorpe explained to me at the 2003 TGfU conference in Melbourne, it is a loose term that refers to the use of modified games for learning with an emphasis on questioning rather direct instruction. While much recent work on TGfU strives to provide a clear structure, and commonly employs rubrics to show teachers how to teach using it I prefer to focus on the principles of learning underpinning TGfU and its broad pedagogical principles to leave some room for teachers and coaches to play with the approach. Using the term, Game Sense, offers more scope to do this. It is also probably closer to the loose concept of teaching games in and through (modified) games proposed by Bunker and Thorpe in 1982 than the far more developed form that TGfU now assumes as suggested by Rod Thorpe in his keynote at the 2008 TGfU conference in Vancouver and by Len Almond and Alan Launder in the TGfU symposium at the 2010 AIESEP World Congress in Spain.