By: Maila Jill Rible 

As soon as Aya Al Sabahi caught wind that her program was offering a new concentration in Transformational Play, she wasted no time throwing her hat in the ring. 

“Not only was it the kind of work I’ve always wanted to do, it was a perfect fit for the kinds of problems I want to solve,” Al Sabahi said.

Al Sabahi is in her first-year pursuing a Master’s in Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). She is one of six students participating in the pilot transformational play concentration offered by the Center for Transformational Play (CTP), a research center that’s part of CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). 

Transformational play connects insights from psychology, learning science, education, game design, and interactive technology. The goal is to design playful systems that influence or reveal how people think, feel, and behave.

Like the rest of her cohort, Al Sabahi was familiar with the concept of transformational game design and had already taken some classes related to the field. But she recognized that branching out from the ETC’s typical project lineup would allow her to explore what she was learning through a more interdisciplinary lens.

“The ETC gives us amazing creative and technical foundations, but they don’t focus as much on other kinds of research,” Al Sabahi said. “It’s really great to be working in an interdisciplinary team that has a different skill set in areas like psychology and a different approach to problem solving.”

Researchers across a variety of fields, from developmental psychology to education, are increasingly interested in how the power of play and playful experiences can reveal how people think and learn and how these experiences can influence behavior. 

The Center for Transformational Play’s director Dr. Jessica Hammer said there is a rich history of using games in areas like health and social change to shape decision making or motivate responses. 

“This concentration is an example of how CMU is leading the way in promoting transformational play as an interdisciplinary effort that explores how playful systems can be designed not just for entertainment, but as tools for research, learning, and social impact,” Hammer said.

“Transformational play helps us connect across disciplines by understanding how problems that look very different on the surface actually share a similar structure,” said Hammer. “For example quitting smoking and using your phone less are often treated as different problems. But they are both about prioritizing long term goals over immediate desires. This is a kind of problem where playful design is especially effective because it can make those long term desires just as attractive as your short term goals.”

The CTP is collaborating with the ETC and other departments to start an ETC concentration in transformational play in Fall 2026. In developing the program, Hammer and her colleagues identified ways to blend together expertise in human behavior, design, and human-computer interaction tools to effectively prepare students to design playful systems that address real-world challenges.

The first project produced by the pilot cohort is an example of this approach. SOKids is a research-driven game for preschool-aged children designed to help researchers better understand how young children perceive and make sense of social categories.

Dr. Catarina Vales, who directs the Cognitive and Social Development Lab in CMU’s Department of Psychology, has spent the past semester working closely with the CTP on the SOKids project. She said that trying to study children at this age is a challenge.

“One of the bottlenecks for us as psychologists when we develop assessment tools for children is that we are not good at making them fun. Our assessments are often boring because we don't have the technical skill to make them like a game,” Vales said. “Part of it is we're not web developers and we also don't necessarily know how to think about these things in a playful manner. This project will allow us to collect high quality data, but do it in a way that is disguised as a playful opportunity.”

Vales and Hammer worked with the students to translate the research goals and concepts surrounding transformational play into an interactive product that captures the needed insights through natural, play-based interactions. The students also had the opportunity to iteratively improve the SOKids game through playtesting at the CMU Children’s School, a laboratory school on CMU’s campus.

First-year ETC student Gamma (Shijia) Zheng was part of the SOKids team this semester, and helped design some of the user experience. For her, the design challenges for the SOKids project – such as considering intuitive interactions and engagement management for very young users and the ethical considerations surrounding this research – offered the kind of interdisciplinary stretch that only a project like this could make possible. 

“We had to approach this from a lot of different angles,” said Zheng. “SOKids had to be designed not to change the kids or introduce any bias. We had to design something that was enjoyable for children but was also a tool for researchers. The chance to learn from others in different sciences was helpful in making the project even more effective than if we were in the same place.”

Early childhood researchers are interested in game-based systems for their ability to capture data during natural play and reduce barriers to research participation, and Zheng said she’s excited about the chance to potentially expand the scope of this area of study.

“If we succeed in making an effective game-based assessment tool there will be a scalable way to use this method. Researchers have a lot of trouble trying to find out kids’ perceptions towards things. This project could actually change the way this is studied and be used in the broader research community,” said Zheng.

Projects like SOKids offer a glimpse into how playful interactive systems can offer new methods for studying human behavior and support learning science research. Hammer is excited that the transformational play concentration is already showing tangible results in the effectiveness of this kind of collaboration. 

“We’re not just training students to use learning science in their transformational experiences, we’re applying learning science to how we're designing the concentration itself,” said Hammer. “We don’t want to just train some very exceptional students. We also want to be a living laboratory for other masters programs to look at some of the things we’re trying and see how they might improve their learning experience.”

For More Information 
Maila Rible | 412-268-2242 | mrible@cmu.edu