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‘Think-out-of-the-box’ — HOW? — DesignPlayStore (Words of a design intern at DesignPlayStore who attempted to gamify empathy for age 4–10) How might we reinforce empathy in children of age 5–10 years by creating tangible play experience. Empathy (one of the pillars of design thinking ), is understanding ones’ experiences from one’s perspective and taking action to help them. Empathy is understanding what, why, and how of others. This step involves observing and engaging with people in order to understand them on a psychological and emotional level. For example, when a child sees that his/her friend has forgotten to bring the tiffin, he shares his tiffin with him or offering a pen in the middle of the exam when your friend’s pen is not working. Why should empathy as a skill be taught to children? In the early years of life, young children start to discover themselves, what they like? What they don’t? and are inclined to think mostly about themselves and their immediate needs. They’re not yet ready to consider the needs and feelings of others. How can empathy be developed? Simulating different scenarios. For example — how will you react when your sibling got a medal? Or what will you do when your friend has stubbed her toe? Creating parallel stories/creating analogies/metaphors. Abstraction (Simplifying in order to understand situation) Role-playing (mimicking) Respecting others ( relating them with their surroundings) Developing it as a part of their daily routine. Journey of creating an empathy tool - It was very helpful to use a mind map as a tool to put down all the data gathered during the whole process to develop meaningful insights. Empathy is not only about the facts of the users, it is more about the emotions felt while performing an activity. Analyzing the journey of a game (Empathy Toy [https://twentyonetoys.com/pages/empathy-toy] ) on the basis of tasks and emotions felt at each level helped to identify the feeling attached to a game/toy. Elements around which brainstorming ideas can be done were identified. For eg. water, air, light, or material. Understanding the core strength of the kid as they already possess certain characters at that stage, there is no need to introduce a new character. The only task is to make the strength loud and visible for better utilization. “I made it factor” plays an important role in a game, children at that age think about themselves (what is there for them, Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development ), this boosts their confidence. Educational and emotional connection (ripple effect) makes the child want to play the game again. Leaderboard (ranking) boosts the children’s competitive side and allows them to play again and again. Breaking down the word empathy allowed us to understand the word more deeply. Given a situation, one makes the other person travel his/her journey and the other has to extrapolate the experience. Brainstorming Understanding different social stigmas that take place in that particular age group like gender-based, skin-based, diversity, and many more and driving a way to solve the same through building empathy. Creating a game based on yes or no will help to understand the basic emotions of a child. For eg. your friend got his toe stuck, how will you feel. Questions like this will help to see the balance of emotions. Situation-based questions will provide a scope of thinking in different directions and make a conclusion after going through different lenses. Giving a certain openness in situations will broaden the scope of thinking. A game in which one can swap places to understand what the other is feeling in the game. For eg. a game based on the profession- one is a businessman, one is a doctor and one is a chef. The game has started, everyone is at a different level and playing according to the profession they got in the game, and then suddenly they have to swap their places. This will help them to carry the game further after putting themselves in others' shoes. DesignPlayStore is still making more ideas and prototyping, and working towards bringing the best possible empathy game for your kids! This post was originally written on Medium in collaboration with DesignPlayStore, you can find the link here.