Everyone knows that the fastest learning is by games and fun. During games, you also integrate with others, get to know them better and spend nice time together. Integration with your team is an important part of coworking and make your job more pleasant. If you want to do something new with your team, learn them some agile and this type of thinking or even present them Scrum, these games will be perfect for you. Remember that all games are for fun and try to avoid strong competition. They are for fun and learning not for making conflicts. Also, you can modify these games but try to keep them in the spirit of Scrum.
So, let’s start.
A Paper Plane
You will need teams with at least 4 people in each, printer papers (it can be used before), space, board and marker.
Each team has to build paper planes which can fly distance 20-30 meters (it depends what difficulty you chose). Planes have to be tested, be high quality and can’t be a paper ball.
Each game lasts 10 minutes: it’s 3 for planning, 4 minutes for building (and testing) and 3 minutes for review/retrospective in groups and at the end of whole games 15 minutes to analyze the process of improvements in each team at the forum.
Game rules:
- Build as many planes as you can in 3 minutes and test them in 1 minute before showing other groups.
- Only planes which can fly more than 20/30 metres will count at the end
- After planning each team should tell how many planes (high quality) they are going to build. That’s obligated for every team. Try to estimate sources and then bring as many planes as you told.
- Sum the final count of all build planes also these which weren’t tested, completed or couldn’t fly. Write it next to these “good scores” to see “tasks in action”
- During the retrospective, each team has to discuss improvements and write them on papers, because after the game every team share their ideas loudly and tell what was good and whatnot.
- Summarize game and ask everybody about their feelings. What they like, what was good etc
Origin idea you find here: https://agilefaq.wordpress.com/2018/11/25/paper-plane-game/
Have fun!
Lego
Create small teams and give them a box with 6 Lego bricks. Every team has the same Legos and have to build a duck, horse, house, tower etc in 1 minute (or even 30 seconds). If you need to build something bigger you can give them 4 more Legos but not more because then it will be too easy.
You will find that every team created a different building using more or fewer bricks. And their art looks different than you expected and different than others. It is an important lesson to clearly communicate what you want to achieve, how and what your team has to do.
Food Tower
Buy a few packs of spaghetti pasta and jelly beans/gums/rubber bands/marshmallows/filaments. (You need something to link this spaghetti).
Create a maximum of 6 person groups and give each of them ¼ pack (about 30 pieces) of spaghetti pasta and bands. Teams have 10-15 minutes to build a tower, house or other building with information that tower should be the highest/biggest and stay for all presentation without any help or repairs. It should also support marshmallow in the highest point of it.
Try to support teams during the game and ask them about their tactics and ideas for this task. Try to talk with teams and during conversation suggest different methods (not always good) to find how they think and motivate to innovation. This is a group task so every member has to have a role. They should at first discuss how to do this and later step by step build making improvements if it will need them. In the end, you can organize a forum where teams show their arts and talk about their ideas, tactics and what they do.
Sprint simulator
It’s more for single persons but you can ask a team to do individually and later discuss their problems during the game and how they found solutions. It will be also very educational because they probably found different solutions and ways to achieve success. Probably each of them fought with different problems so sharing them on the forum can start a discussion.
Game build a Polish company game and I truly recommend it: http://agilegame.octigo.pl/
There are many more games which will help you prepare your team for agile methodology but these are the most popular. I’m sure that you and your team will like them. If you know any more games/ activities having some elements from Scrum/Agile give a comment and I’m sure I’ll try them with my buddies.
