Games to Develop Empathy

The professor of the Physical and Sports Education Area of the UMH Alba Roldán proposes a game the whole family can play at home while keeping social distancing. With a simple exercise, you can start to empathize with people who have a visual disability. Would you be able to overcome the challenge?

Discover and Play with Other Capabilities (from 5 years on)

For this game, you’ll need at least two people and you can use materials that we’ll surely have at home:

• An opaque handkerchief or cloth to cover your eyes comfortably.
• Material for modelling. It can be soft modelling material (such as putty or plasticine) or construction parts to made a stable and manipulable figure can (as the one shown in the video or similar).

One of the participants will create a figure with the material or the interlocking parts. The details of the figure should be noticeable enough for the other players to feel different shapes only with their hands. The other players cannot see the figure.

The players are blindfolded and, just by touching the reference figure, they must replicate it with the same materials. There’s no time limit for this game.

Other Games (under 5 years)

With younger children, other empathy games can be played, as long as they feel comfortable with being blindfolded and they’re in a safe environment:

• Object recognition: the blindfolded person is given different objects that should guess. It may also be proposed to him to sort objects by size or put similar objects in pairs.
• Pied Piper of Hamelin: in a clear place, blindfold a child and play music or make a noise that he/she should walk toward.
• Paint and draw blindfolded.

With the collaboration of Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología-Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.

Did you like these activities? You have many more available, for young and old, in the special ‘Science in your living room’