Play and Legos Help Students Stay Ahead of the Game

In a way, one of the most important things Mridula Chalamalasetti, Ed.M.’25, brought to the Harvard Graduate School of Education was a box of Legos.

Chalamalasetti, who earned her master’s in HGSE’s Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology Program in May, was “obsessed” with puzzles and making things with Lego bricks growing up. It’s an interest that didn’t fade with age, instead becoming an important teaching tool as she started working in classrooms in India.

Chalamalasetti’s undergraduate work was in psychology, sociology, and economics, but she soon found herself in the classroom. She remembers the students she encountered during her Teach For India fellowship who struggled post pandemic to adapt to the traditional classroom environment. 

“I taught in a public school in Bangalore, and that is where I noticed that there was a lot of rote learning in the classroom,” she says. “For students, when they got back into classrooms, all they wanted was play and they just wanted to have fun with their friends. They didn’t want to touch their books or any of the structured things that the teachers were expecting them to do.”

Facing students who were checking out on more rote learning, Chalamalasetti started to experiment with “a lot of random things” in the classroom, finding ways students could learn through play in a way that didn’t feel like they were studying, while still focusing on academic goals. So into the classroom came her box of Lego bricks from home, along with a number of games she play tested in the classroom in real time.

“I would turn algebra into this whole mystery that they had to solve,” Chalamalasetti recalls. “They would just get used to using the alphabet in place of numbers. Like, that’s what algebra does. So I tried out a bunch of things like that, and that’s when I actually got into seeing games as a way of working to improve educational learning outcomes in the classroom.”

In 2024, Chalamalasetti joined Meha Wadher and Abhijith Giridhar to start Games for Ed, an organization that aims to integrate playful learning into mainstream education in India. Building on what she learned at the Ed School, the group has designed and implemented a variety of games for grades 4–8 classrooms across Bengaluru, India.

Designed to augment existing classroom curriculum, some of the games created by Games for Ed are modifications of existing ones, often played in low-tech environments with big groups of 30 or 40 students. Chalamalasetti recalls making games based on the election system in India, or an English vocabulary game based on the classic board game Snakes and Ladders. 

“If there was a card that said ‘museums,’ they had to write all of the words that they knew were associated with museums in English,” says Chalamalasetti. “So at the end of it we got students to tally how many words they had, and they were surprised that they actually knew a lot. Because if you asked them to have a conversation with you in English, they’d hardly talk to you. That was a confidence-building game for them.”

Chalamalasetti first met Giridhar while working at Upepo, a playful learning newsletter curated by HGSE alum Prasanth Nori, Ed.M.’19. And while her partners found their path to play outside of HGSE, the lessons learned on Appian Way have become essential to Games for Ed as it grows.

“I had never studied it or talked about play as much as I did through my HGSE experience. I think all the classes did give me that freedom to talk about play the way I wanted to, and use it the way I wanted to,” says Chalamalasetti. “I did a lot of designing of games, and I also explored play deeply, which I had not done before.”

Weeks before graduation in May, Games for Ed was awarded $5,000 as runner-up in the Seed for Change competition, an annual award given out by Harvard’s Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute. Games for Ed was also part of Harvard Innovation Lab’s summer program and its Social Impact Fellowship Fund.

Chalamalasetti said the dozens of grant opportunities she learned about while at HGSE have helped expand what’s possible with Games for Ed and will help her co-founders sharpen the organization’s pitch as it continues to grow.

“It was a learning journey for us also, as a team. Because with every application, you’re looking at the organization in a different way,” says Chalamalasetti. “It’s not just about convincing someone games are important but learning the language of the organization and what we want to do and the sort of impact we want to create, the number of students we want to reach.”

With the Seed for Change grant, Chalamalasetti aims to develop about 20 new games to take into 30 or so more classrooms in India. The hope is to also train 200 new teachers across Bengaluru to implement the games in their existing classroom curriculum.

Armed with new games and the language and science of play learned at HGSE, Chalamalasetti hopes the project will only grow in the coming years as learning through play begins to be better understood by others in education.

“It’s easier to go talk to teachers, go talk to school principals, even parents, because sometimes what happens is parents look at play as a waste of time, but it’s actually not,” Chalamalasetti says. “It’s building so many nonacademic skills that are so important right now. Critical thinking, collaboration, team-building, all of that. We see it happen through games so much better than when they’re just reading a book and writing for their exams through rote learning.”