The ball point game has many uses in your classroom.
I was at #p4a24 last weekend. I am a co-organiser, and also a participant. Play4Agile is a collaborative, co-creative event held annually at Seminarzentrum Rueckersbach. The people, both participants, and staff, create a community, and a home for the weekend. It is unlike any other event, that I’ve attended.
Sabina Lammert offered a ‘ball point game medley’ session on Saturday. Her goal was to try out the eight different variations to the basic game. I found that I’ve been doing a slight variation of the classic ball point game. I also found the game had more options, that I’d not come across before. These can be used to teach different aspects of team collaboration according to what the team might need at the time.
Boris Gloger invented the game, and rules used to be on their website. This is a version that I found elsewhere. Other variations can be found here (lots of details), and here (theory of play).
I always find it interesting to see how people facilitate games that I already use. This gives me a learning opportunity, for facilitation in general, and also maybe a nuance of the game, which I hadn’t noticed before.
This session was no different. There were about 18 people in the session, and only a third had played the game before. Sabina had us each start with a ball. I always started teams with a bag of balls that one person picked up and passed on. We did two rounds of this so the new people could experience the game. This is what you see in the photo.
Then we split into two teams. The feel was different as communication changed. What was harder to follow in a big group became more manageable.
The next round challenged us to beat the record she’d seen previously, 156. This let me try an option that I’d heard of for a record. It was interesting, but more challenging than expected. We achieved 65. This shows that teams need to do bigger changes to achieve more than incremental change.
For the next round we had a quality issue presented, where if a ball fell to the ground, then that ball had to restart. This could be useful for quality assurance work such as pharmaceuticals. Now we found that we had to go slower to keep pace and not lose time.
In the next round we were all given random roles to follow in the team. This offered some interesting challenges as people’s behaviour changed in the team. Now someone would criticise all suggestions, aim to facilitate the team, or try to undo the effort, for example.
The last session had a longer time for retrospective to see how we could improve our score. This was interesting as we could linger longer on what we might do, and plan it out. We did 70 in that round. Our best effort.
The ball point game is useful. You would not normally do this medley, but rather focus on the classic, and then one variation to illustrate the issue you wanted the team to experience.
Use the game to introduce students to scrum
You can do the scrum game in any space where the students can spread out enough to create the shape they will most likely need to do the game. After the game leave plenty of time for debriefing to let the students discuss amongst themselves. Then you can have them share thoughts with the class as a whole. Using 1-2-4-all from liberating structures is ideal.
This post is part of a project pulling together my materials and ideas about Teaching Team Collaboration: the Human-Side of Software Development for software development to students.
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The ideas above are from my book 101+ Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration, which covers all of these little things that students can do to improve their collaboration.