All work and no play makes Jack a dull team member: a novel approach to instilling teamwork skills into postgraduate science students

Contemporary societal challenges require teamwork. Students in specialised degrees become disciplinary experts, but can struggle to work effectively in teams. The current approaches to teaching teamwork are short-term focused, outcome-oriented, difficult to assess, and are hated by educators and students alike. To address these challenges, a non-assessable teamwork activity was devised. During the affectionately termed “playdate”, student teams had to develop a game that could teach other students about a challenge of teamwork. Theories of Design Thinking and Play provided a scaffold for open-ended problem solving in a generative space. Our analysis of events on the day, supplemented by comments and feedback from students, allowed for comparison of this novel experience to previous student and educator experiences that involved teamwork, and confirmed this approach suited the needs of students, educators, and institutions by addressing the most common challenges with regard to the use of teamwork activities in tertiary education.