This blog forms part of a series of blogs with team building ideas. To find out more team building ideas just click on the “team building” category within the blog and read them all.
Construction projects for team building exercises.
All constructional activities will require advance preparation. When you are selecting your activity think about how much time you want it to take, some can easily last 2 hours, others can be reduced to ten minutes. Also think about how much space you have, and how messy you are prepared for everyone to get.
At the end of the activity you may like to give each team a feedback sheet to fill in to look at how they worked as a team.
Firstly with all projects decide on what tools you are going to give the teams and make sure you give all teams the same quantity.
Ideas for constructional materials include:
- Paperclips
- Newspaper
- Drinking straws
- Cocktail sticks
- Toilet rolls
- Chocolate bars
- Marshmallows
- Household rubbish such as cereal boxes, toilet roll tubes, plastic cartons.
Use a mixture, or just one type of material.
You might want to give each team a pair of scissors, or not (it all depends on how inventive you want them to get).
And don’t forget you also need to provide some form of adhesives (or do you??)
Ideas for adhesives include:
- Blue tack
- Sellotape
- Hard glue-stick or hot glue gun (always avoid PVA glue as it never dries fast enough!)
- Paperclips
You can make the projects intentionally easy or difficult depending on what you provide.
As to what they have to build, that all depends on how long you are prepared to give them!
Quick building projects
Keep the range of constructional materials and adhesives small. You might like to just provide drinking straws, tape and scissors, or a packet of marshmallows and cocktail sticks.
In terms of projects here are a few ideas:
- Build the tallest structure.
- Build something capable of holding up a small book or other object.
- Build a desk tidy, or another small useful object.
- Build a bridge.
- Build a marble race.
You might be able to think of some more.
As to who wins…
Firstly did they manage the task set?
If more than one team achieves the goal then you might also like to mark on originality, use of objects and aesthetic appearance.
Long building projects.
As well as the constructional and adhesive materials you also require an egg for each team. (This works best if the eggs are raw, but depending on the facility you have available for the project you might need to hard boil them for messiness sake!)
In terms of constructional materials this usually works best with a selection of general household rubbish.
You might want to have available a hot glue gun to help with adhesives.
The project can be one of two options:
- Build a mechanism to transport an egg from one end of the room to the other that must be let go by a certain point and not touched again at the end (and they are not allowed to simply throw it!)
- Build a mechanism to protect an egg from a drop of X height.
As to who wins…
Firstly did they manage the task set?
If more than one team achieves the goal then you might also like to mark on originality, use of objects and aesthetic appearance.
Team work projects
As before give each team a selection of building materials and adhesives. This project works best if they are given two sheets of card, two sheets of coloured paper, 12 cocktail sticks and 10 tiny marshmallows and three coloured pens. Other items should be a pair of scissors and a roll of sellotape. (Note: the materials must be the same for each team, and you will need a lot of extras of all for the second half of the activity.)
Each team is told they have to build a novelty item for a specific event (such as the Queen’s coronation). All the teams work to produce the item in a specific length of time, say 15 minutes.
Each item is judged by a panel (usually the facilitator, or one person from each team.) However the activity doesn’t stop there! Now that a winning model has been selected each team must make as many possible identical copies of the winning model in 15 minutes. Further materials (but not any extra adhesives or scissors) are provided for this purpose and each team is given some time to study the original before the race begins.
As to who wins…
There are two prizes, the first is for the best item decided by the panel, and the second is the team with the most identical copies. (Oddly this isn’t usually the team that wins the first half!)