Ta-Da! – Dr. Tong Li on his magic approach to teaching.  

Written by: Steven Donahoe

It’s 8 p.m. on a Wednesday night. You peak into the door of EMDD 392 where Dr. Tong Li is teaching his small group of second-year graduate students. Instead of drooping, tired faces, there are enthusiastic expressions of disbelief as Li performs yet another bewildering magic trick – this time making a feather levitate in mid-air.

“How’d you do that?” asks the giddy class of twenty-five to thirty-year-old professionals.

“Magic,” Li answers with a grin.

Long before he ever began performing for his students, Dr. Tong Li was an avid fan of the art of magic. His interest in magic began in 2010 when he was studying in his native China, where his college roommate taught him some beginner card tricks. After learning from his roommate, he continued to dive deeper, watching tutorials and learning from YouTube videos (now he has his own!). As he improved his sleight-of-hand and audience patter, he began performing for others – first classmates and then larger audiences in talent shows.

“I always enjoyed giving an audience a sense of wonder. Making people believe that something impossible just happened, even if only for a moment, is a, well, magic feeling,” says Li.

As a gamer, he draws a a parallel between a well-performed magic trick and an immersive video game world, in which the player is allowed to “live in a place without the limitations we have in the real world.” Self-described as “more of an introvert”, he appreciates the chance to come out of his shell and play the part of entertainer. Fundamentally, he views magic as a freeing force for both himself and his audience.

However, as much joy as magic had brought him in his life, Li had never full grasped the potential for magic to be utilized in an educational context until he worked as a teaching assistant at an elementary school in Connecticut in 2011. Li’s goal was to make his class as much fun as a magic show is for his students – no small feat. In a demonstration of how the world would be without gravity, he made a table levitate. The kids ooh’d and ah’d, completely captivated by Li’s lesson. Just as those adolescents were amazed in 2011, so too are Dr. Li’s current students and colleagues as he effortlessly weaves illusions and mind games into his lessons on design thinking.

“I love having Tong as a professor! He always finds fun ways to keep the class engaged but still teach the design/HCI principles,” says student Hailey Leonard.

“Tong’s magic tricks make me look forward to class and help me to visualize the concepts he’s explaining,” echoes student Hayley Burris.

From an EMDD perspective, Li believes that, “magic is similar to design thinking in that you learn equally from your failures as you do from your successes.”