A Toy for Empathy: originally a student project designed as a navigational aid to bridge the communication gap between visually-impaired students and their sighted classmates. Now an award-winning product set for use in 300+ schools worldwide to unlock creativity and kickstart deep discussions around skills that are often overlooked in classrooms.

Each toy set includes an 80-page guidebook and workshop outlines for any K-12 classroom. Topics include: creative dialogue, conflict resolution, leadership & teamwork, design thinking.

We believe toys can teach the skills that textbooks can't and, like all design projects, we’re starting with Empathy.

http://twentyonetoys.com/toys/empathy/

The Empathy Toy is the first in a series of toys in development for a Design Thinking Toolkit by Twenty One Toys, a company I founded over a year and half ago. It poses the question: Where are creativity, play, teamwork, and empathy in our classrooms, our boardrooms, or the public square? More importantly, how do we teach these critical skills?

When I first started I was inspired by people like Ken Robinson, who says that “Schools Kill Creativity’”, and the growing movement within education to teach people what Mariale Hardiman calls the key 21st-century skills: Creativity, Collaborative Learning, Innovation and Problem Solving… But then I scratched the surface and realized we weren’t the first to try to enhance education or unlock learning with toys. Friedrich Froebel, the 19th-century inventor of Kindergarten, developed 20 toys –or “gifts”, as he called them– to demonstrate that play could be used as a tool for learning. Those toys were the foundation of what we know today as Kindergarten. Often considered the world’s first educational toys, they were instrumental in inspiring visionaries such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, and Wassily Kandinsky (to name a few).

The brief we pose as a young startup is: If Friedrich Froebel were alive today, what toys would he design? What skills would he find missing from current school curricula? We believe 21st-century educational toys must highlight skills like Empathy, Failure, Improvisation, and Creative Communication. (Skills that are now considered the foundation of creative education and whole-mind approaches.)

The Empathy Toy was a student project that I then re-designed as an educational tool –including guidebooks and resource materials– with my business partner, Gonzalo Riva.

Our philosophy going into the redesign was that we see play as a unique form of learning -- and that when we play, we think more fluidly and are more unguarded. So why does play end at 1st grade? Who decided that was the line to stop harnessing play as a learning tool? We always need tangible anchor points (objects) to elevate our thinking into the difficult level of abstraction. We draw a lot of inspiration from Italian designer Bruno Munari, who talked about "air made visible". Designers often have a bent toward creating something tangible (a product, an experience) to distil a complex idea or illustrate a way of seeing the world. To us, tactile play objects do exactly that. They take the cloaking device off of the nuances of human interaction. They make visible the extremely tangled problems and abstract skills of the 21st century, which are often so elusive to describe or harness.

So if we combine open-ended play with some purposeful debrief discussion to assess what happens in a game, we can use “play metaphors” to see into the window of how we think and communicate. Toys can be the Trojan horse to break through the overly direct analysis and structure of the typical classroom -- without trying to dismantle the whole system at once.

The Empathy Toy was my thesis project while studying Industrial Design at Carleton University, and designed in collaboration with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. I was asked to design a navigational aid for the visually impaired. They were thinking “Blackberry with big buttons”, but after 2 months of interviews and ethnographic research I discovered that one of the biggest navigational barriers for the visually impaired was communication -- particularly with the sighted community. I also discovered that students with visual impairment missed 30% of class time, had a permanent adult assistant, and need to practice Orientation & Mobility (O&M) skills daily. So I created a brief to design a game that taught the foundations of O&M: "Where am I? Where am I going? How do I get there?"... while at the same time developing empathy and a common language between the visually impaired and their sighted classmates. While I tested with young students, most of my iterations happened in my studio and I found that it was just as challenging and rewarding for players of almost any ability or age.

You can watch my TEDx talk about the evolution of the Empathy Toy here: http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxConcordia-Ilana-Ben-Ari-Toy

A few years after completing school I founded Twenty One Toys and have worked with our team to redesign the Empathy Toy into an educational tool. Our first prototypes went into over 100 classrooms around Canada and we spent our first year interviewing and researching all the ways that teachers were using our toys (based on our outlines, but also other methods that they developed themselves).

… You can find a few of our short teacher videos, profiling some of the educators we spoke to here: http://twentyonetoys.com/educators/#empathy-stories-videos

In our first year we were surprised to discover the many creative uses of the toys by educators and facilitators. We then hired an in-house educator to help us develop updated resources for our Learning Foundations book, to reflect all of the feedback and new case studies. That was designed in the fall of 2013 and we then launched a Kickstarter campaign to produce our first 1000 toy sets at a much more affordable price (down from $425/set to $121). With close to 500 backers we raised over $50,000 and are now in the midst of toy mass production.

You can see a link to our campaign here: kickstarter.com/projects/21toys/a-toy-for-empathy-unlocking-creativity-at-all-ages

While Empathy is difficult to teach it is even harder to measure and analyze. Almost all of our impact measurement has been through anecdotal stories, teacher testimonials and case studies. You can find a directory of those here: http://twentyonetoys.com/toys-in-the-classroom/

So far what we’ve discovered from speaking to our early customers is that by having an object in the classroom that has one purpose, for Empathy, it gives that skill a value and a context. Now there is an object to speak to, that represents a difficult conversation or creative approach. This has started to create a cultural shift in the classroom, and ultimately, we hope, in the entire school. One that values creativity, play, and design thinking as an important part of education.

Thanks to our recent Kickstarter win, we will be in over 300 schools around the world by this spring. You can get a sense of how many schools we’ve already reached here: https://twentyonetoys.wistia.com/medias/u9wz5st8fg

Finally, through one of our awards we have even received a year of free consulting from impact analysts Social Asset Measurements, so we’re working with them to develop a rubric to measure our impact beyond the anecdotal. Like most design projects, this will take iteration.

The overall philosophy behind our project was self-defined. It is based around the idea that the mark of exceptional education used to be about the sorts of abstractions that books enable -- retention, regurgitation, analysis, manipulation of known ideas. This is what "made us smarter" than the reality of our jobs. Concrete educational tools (like exams) were about converging on knowledge.

The marks of exceptional education now are: the ability to create things that don't yet exist, adaptation, self-analysis, and problem-solving collaboratively (meaning a healthy dose of communicating across diverse perspectives). So what's the anchor point for things as complex as that? Educational tools need to be divergent and generative. Just like a good discussion. But we don't have discussion tools.

We think only toys can boil down the tough stuff into easy to understand moments of insight. They're objects for thinking in metaphors. So our toys aren't so much the product; they just make the air visible. The product is the discussion. The outcome is you -- your insights, and a tangible sense of the full spectrum of your skills.

We have devoted the past year to following many of the teachers that have been using our toy prototypes in their classrooms, as well as speaking to their students.

We discovered countless applications for the toys beyond our expectations -- from special needs to mental health, leadership camps to innovation labs. One of our favorites is from a teacher using our toy to introduce Integrative Thinking (a form of design thinking from the Rotman School of Management) to her middle school class: http://www.heidisiwak.com/2013/05/unexpected-lessons-in-communication-and.html

“This has been, without question, the most powerful tool for teaching communication that I have ever come across.” - Heidi Siwack

The MIT Media Lab’s Global Minimum project will also be using the toys: "Our newest initiative in Sierra Leone, InLabs, asks youth between the ages of 13 and 19 to identify problems in their communities, design solutions for those problems and continuously test their prototypes. Empathy is a key skill youth in our program will strengthen to accomplish this goal… We look forward to introducing Empathy Toys to help our youth build the confidence and skills necessary to conduct field work. Play can also illuminate to youth the challenges and value of building empathy to create social impact."

You can see our short “Toys in the Classroom” video here: https://vimeo.com/71311526 ...and a more involved directory here: http://twentyonetoys.com/toys-in-the-classroom/