On the first day of the January 2020 Tech Camp, organized by Oysters & Pearls-Uganda, and held annually at Gulu High School, we had exciting team-building sessions with support from a team from Yiya Engineering Solutions.
The team members comprised of instructors, communicators, students, teachers, administrators and managers from different areas, some of whom had never seen or talked to each other.
The session was a great platform for the team leaders and instructors to interact and learn how to make the classes they will be teaching more interactive and how to go about the challenges they might come across while having fun as they do it.
Like all O&P Tech Camps, we started the session with a team-building game: the marshmallow challenge!
Teams of four members were challenged to build the tallest structure in just 18 minutes using less than 20 sticks of spaghetti and a yard of tape. In the end, the structure had to be able to stand alone and hold a sachet of marshmallow, for minutes on end.
This was done to give the team leaders and instructors and peer trainers ideas and tips on how to make learning a joyful journey of discovery for students, and to encourage them to speak out their ideas with confidence, for the benefit of the whole group.
During the reflection session, Bonita, an administrator at Oysters & Pearls-Uganda, reflected that her group had to try out different suggestions before finally coming up with a stand-alone structure, to carry a sachet of marshmallow.
After concluding the marshmallow challenge, the team was taken through the magic loop game. In this game, Erin, the team leader of Yiya Engineering Solutions, asked members who had never talked to each other before, or on that day, to pair up. Together, the pair wore sisal loops on both wrists, entangled at the center. They were asked to get free from each other, without untying the loop.
A few pairs seemed to get free from each other without a struggle, but other pairs had to twist their wrists, stand back-to-back, enter the loop and pass it through their legs, without success.
In the end, the team members were excited to hear that the game was intended to make them learn to socialize and to not be afraid to ask for outside help when faced with a challenge.
