Play-based interventions and approaches to support environmental awareness have garnered widespread interest across designers, educators and design researchers. Activities and learning materials for Environmental Education (EE) are designed to support learners’ development of knowledge, skills, attitude and pro-environmental action. Teachers facilitating EE activities in formal learning spaces are key to the context within which various teaching-learning resources are employed. Yet, teachers’ perceptions of play and its role within EE is often overlooked. This study aims to explore the challenges and opportunities in this regard, focusing on middle-school teachers in Rajasthan (India). We present and discuss scenarios of playful design processes with teachers, and assess their relevance to designing EE resources. Key questions guiding the study are; How do teachers analyse and frame environmental awareness activities? What are the assumptions underlying their experiences of conducting such activities? How might we design ways to uncover opportunities for play considering various contextual challenges? Through this study we further aim to develop methods to engage EE facilitators in design processes, develop a range of activity materials as cases, and find new approaches to evaluate such materials.