Looking for a fun, hands-on way to sharpen interdisciplinary thinking? Or a lively activity to get to know each other as a team?

The (Inter)Disciplinary Question is a collaborative learning game designed for students and researchers working across disciplines. Centred on formulating research questions, the game invites players to explore how different disciplines think, what they value, and how their methods and assumptions shape both the questions they ask—and the answers they consider possible.

Why research questions?

This game uses research questions to reveal disciplinary differences and spark creative, interdisciplinary thinking, because the questions we ask as academics shape how societal problems are understood, what data and methods are used to study them, and what counts as knowledge!

For whom is this game?

By playfully confronting disciplinary differences and overlaps, participants gain insight into their own ways of thinking while learning to appreciate those of others. The result? Richer conversations, sharper questions, and more creative and effective interdisciplinary collaboration. Whether used in the classroom, a workshop, or a research group, The (Inter)Disciplinary Question turns disciplinary diversity into a learning journey and makes conversations across boundaries enjoyable and insightful.

How does it work?

Players form teams that correspond to a certain discipline (e.g. law, economics, cultural anthropology) and respond to shared scenarios by stepping into the shoes of researchers from other disciplines to formulate the kind of research questions that discipline would ask. In each round, an expert team evaluates the questions and awards points, with the winning team being the one that best captures another discipline’s way of thinking. While for some teams the aim is to win, the main pedagogical aim of the game is to foster lively discussion, mutual understanding, and creative interdisciplinary collaboration.

This game was developed with financial support from the Interdisciplinary Education Group, Contesting Governance, Institutions for Open Societies (IOS), and the Utrecht Young Academy (UYA) at Utrecht University.