Play With A Purpose

Every organization or program consists of different groups of people and what works for one might not be true for all the rest of the team members.

According to Michael Cardus, President of Create-Learning Teambuilding in Buffalo, New York, “Most successful team-building activities will be explicitly linked back to participants' jobs, and they'll understand how skills developed can translate into workplace habits. To make that happen, each teambuilding experience must be strategically designed with specific goals in mind.”

Here is a list of games that were played during the Rowers Camp last July 11-13, 2014 together with the lessons and realizations that were being implied in each game.

The World Café

The World Café is a creative process for facilitating group dialogues. It allows the members of each group to create a living network of conversation and action. In this process, a café ambiance is created, in which participants discuss a question or issue in small groups around the café tables. At regular intervals, the participants move to a new table. One table host remains and summarizes the previous conversation to the new table guests. Thus, the proceeding conversations are cross-fertilized with the ideas generated in former conversations by the participants. At the end of the process, the main ideas are summarized in a plenary session and follow-up possibilities are discussed.

Getting-to-know-you

The getting-to-know-you activity requires each member of the big group to approach other members whom they have not known yet and introduce themselves to them and vice-versa, and after a few minutes, they are told to move to the next person and repeat the same process.

Egg Painting

The egg painting is an individual activity wherein each member of the group is given one egg. The egg is a representation of each member’s individuality. This activity allows the members to reflect about themselves, their goals and aspirations in life, struggles, and as well as their personal reasons as to why they joined the organization/program they are currently in.After reflecting, they are told to express all those realizations in a painting which will be placed on the eggs that are given to them.

The Important Thing

Each of the members in the group is to prepare one thing that they consider important to them. Afterwards, each of the groups is to form an oval and they are told to place their important things outside the oval. The objective of this game is to build teamwork, and it also teaches them that all the members of the organization should help each other to reach their goals.

The Human Factory

The goal of this game is to transport all team members at the end of the line without allowing him to touch the ground. This activity teaches us to trust our team members.

Chaos

The group is divided into small teams. Each group is given a hoola-hoop where they will place the balls that they will collect.The facilitators of the game will put a hoola-hoop at the center with a number of balls inside it. The goal of the game is for the members of the group to get as many balls as they can to win the game.

But be warned: this game is very tricky! What is actually expected from all the groups is to put all their hoola-hoops together at the center; thus, all teams get to collect the most numbers of balls inside their respective hoola-hoops.

This game teaches the members of the group that there are things in life that are not achieved by selfishness and pride. Oftentimes, goals are better achieved if everyone is at peace and works hand in hand to achieve their common goal.

Egg Roll

The game Egg Roll reminds and teaches the group to aim their goal towards the finish line without breaking the eggs. The eggs represent each of the members of the group. The game teaches us that in an organization it is important that we be very considerate about our safety as well as the safety of other members of the group as we go along in reaching our goals.

The Maze

In this game, the members of the organization are blind-folded. The goal of the game is for each of them to get out of the maze. This game teaches us that sometimes in life we cannot get through our struggles alone and that we need each other. The players of the game can ask for help from the game facilitators. But they are only allowed to ask questions answerable by Yes or No. What is expected from each member is to ask the facilitators one question: Can you please help me in getting through this maze?

These are just a few of the activities that everyone can play during your team building sessions. There are still tons of ideas from books and the internet. You might also want to create your own team activities. Just put this important question in mind before implementing a game: How are they going to apply the lessons learned during the games to volunteer work?