Newsroom

Christina Hnatov and I walked across the University of Maryland campus to grab bubble tea, chatting about knitting, grading, birding, the solar system, and course assignments. This was typical for our conversations: jumping from topic to topic, sharing things that caught our attention in an unstructured idea exchange.

Recently I had the honor of participating in a panel during the 3rd annual TerrapinSTRONG symposium here at the University of Maryland. The topic of this year’s symposium was Navigating Change: Turning Disruption into Direction, and the panel I participated in was titled Building Capacity: Supporting Ourselves & Others through Change. While preparing for that panel, I realized I have a lot to share about this topic — more than we had time to discuss during the symposium!

Over the course of this year, we’ve highlighted a few stories centered around the work of Christina Hnatov, the Academy’s Curriculum and Experience Designer.

At The Academy, we love seeing students take their learning beyond The Loft and into the real world. That’s exactly what Xinyi Zhang did when she transformed a personal conversation into an impactful, multicultural board game called Sea My Culture.

In a digital age where interactions often feel fleeting, how do we truly connect with ourselves and others in more intentional ways? IDEA360: 500 Friends but No One to Play With is a new course we’re offering this spring, that explores this question and more. It’s designed to help students reimagine their relationships by exploring how play and experimentation can transform the way we engage with the world.