This year, the Innovation Hub partnered with the Centre for Community Partnerships to host a series of design thinking workshops for Alternative Reading Week (ARW) 2025. In this post, Amelia and ARW facilitators, Ruth and Lidiia, reflect on the power of learning through play.
Written by Amelia Di Meo, Research Coordinator, Master of Health Science, Translational Research
Alternative Reading Week (ARW) happens every February, and allows students across U of T to participate in real experiential learning activities in the community. In collaboration with the Centre for Community Partnerships, the Innovation Hub hosted a three-day workshop for ARW 2025 to introduce students to design thinking research and analysis skills. The aim of our workshop was to encourage students to apply design thinking to uncover student needs and experiences, focusing on the role of commuting and mental health in students’ lives. This year, we reshaped the approach to learning through engaging activities that were creative, fun, and playful.
Play to Empathize
During ARW, the workshop participants engaged in play in a variety of ways. On the first day of the workshop, students had the chance to partner up and interview each other, which is a key part of the data collection process in design research. During this activity, students had a chance to role-play by practicing empathy-based interviewing skills in a low-stakes setting. Students learned how these skills, such as active listening, asking open-ended questions, and non-verbal cues, can help others to feel heard. As they continued to role play, they practiced creating a safe environment for people to be vulnerable during feedback sessions and interviews, ultimately fostering a deeper sense of empathy.
Below, Ruth reflects on how play is key in fostering empathy in design research:
Ruth: During ARW, we asked students to practice empathy-based interviewing skills through a simple role-play activity. The question students asked each other was, “tell me about your shoes.” When responding to this prompt, students were having fun coming up with creative answers and inventing interesting stories about their shoes. Through this activity, they practiced their empathy-based interviewing skills in a fun environment that encouraged them to use their imagination and explore their creativity. Practicing these interview skills in this fun and safe environment gave them the confidence to confront the discomfort that comes with learning, and be unafraid to make mistakes.
Practicing empathy-based interviewing skills during ARW allowed students to let loose and not be afraid to make mistakes, all while having fun collaborating with each other. Through these engaging activities, we watched our students get deeper with each other and develop a stronger sense of curiosity and empathy as interviewers.
Play to Understand
Play is known to be a learning tool that facilitates creativity and critical thinking skills, which can lead to deep understanding. On the second day of the workshop, participants created empathy maps to explore what students think, feel, say, and do. The teams collaborated with each other and used sticky notes to share their thoughts to organize, analyze, and reflect on their qualitative data. Then, they reflected on the most impactful stories that were shared to identify the underlying needs. Through this activity, students learned to deepen their understanding of student experiences, stepping outside of their own experiences.
Below, Lidiia, who facilitated the empathy mapping activity, shares her reflections on how physically engaging with chart paper and sticky notes was key in helping students to deeply understand design thinking methodologies.
Lidiia: Seeing students think deeply about feelings and how to categorize them was such a joyful moment for me because I saw how design thinking makes data analysis a fun and engaging process. I think the most exciting part for the students was noticing the fun they had while physically engaging with chart papers, sticky notes, and markers. Using these tools let them visualize their thinking.
By engaging in empathy mapping, students were not only having fun, but were also learning to think critically about student stories, often “reading between the lines” to identify deeper core needs. Activities like this can help us understand diverse experiences and perspectives that broaden our worldviews.
Play to Grow
Deep learning through play can help students to grow personally and professionally. We aimed to create a low-pressure space where students can develop and apply new skills, understanding that these skills in teamwork, design thinking, and innovation can extend into their professional and academic lives. Throughout all of our ARW programming, the most important takeaway for students was a sense of growth and empowerment as emerging design thinkers and changemakers.
At the end of the third day, students used the information from the sticky notes to generate an insight based on needs they identified to create a clay model to visually represent the insight that they generated. When students were building their clay models, they thought deeply about the different ways they could represent the need in their insight. I could see their minds at work, deep in thought, as they built their models while crafting stories to explain the thoughts and feelings of students to add context to the need. Students went beyond the surface, reading between the lines of data, explored the “why,” and inferred student thoughts and feelings to build clay models that explored the student journey – and told a story.
While playing, students were not only practicing their critical thinking skills, but were engaging in deep learning. Beyond design research skills, students got to develop their skills in critical thinking, emotional intelligence, peer collaboration, and outside-the-box thinking.
Don’t Be Scared to Play!
As an ARW facilitator this year, a main piece of learning was that it can be beneficial to move away from fully lecture-based formats that rely on remote memorization, and explore hands-on, playful activities where possible. By incorporating a diverse and engaging teaching approach, we can ensure students develop their skills in ways that are impactful for them as learners. In each day of ARW, we were pleased to see how the Innovation Hub became filled with lively discussion and laughter as students collaborated with each other while playing and exploring. Embracing creative activities and designing curriculum for deep learning, team-building, and fun can be a powerful way to learn and facilitate. Every time I learn by playing, I am surprised by how much more I am able to retain – and how many additional skills I can acquire along the way!
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