Random Request

This activity sheds light on entrepreneurial skills such as leadership, management and collaboration while participants reflect on their own role in a team, recognise time pressure when working on an assignment, practice planning and experience leadership.

Required equipment (excl. papers, sticks, tape, etc.)

Per team:

• Handout template, 1 for each team
• Pen

For the teacher:

• Prize for the winning team
• Stamp or stickers (to prove you’ve seen/checked the assignment/challenge)
• Stopwatch
• Projector

Firstly, prepare a questionnaire including several games, challenges, questions and puzzles. 

This fun, energetic activity will develop and improve students’ management and cooperation skills. The activity is very practical and students must work in small teams. The activity will ask them to solve and answer a wide range of questions, puzzles, problems and challenges. The students need to collaborate and create solutions and answers as quickly as possible. 

Consider the following:

• • Provide more challenges and questions than the students can finish in 20 minutes, so students must choose carefully which assignments to complete.
  • Assign high points to ‘easy’ challenges and low points to assignments which takes a lot of time or are difficult to execute.
  • To make it more fun for students, adapt the questions and challenges to your local environment and use fun facts about your city.
  • It might be handy to have another person by your side. In this way you can split the tasks and have someone around who can support you in counting the points and watch the groups.

Divide the group into teams of three students and hand out the assignment template which you have prepared in advance to each team. The winning team is the one who collects the greatest number of points. 

RULES for students:

• • The winning team is the one that has earned the most points.
  • No cheating, no discussions about the way points are assigned. 
  • Carefully read the instructions and assignments on the paper. 
  • Write your answers on the answer sheet you have received from the teacher. This sheet is also used to collect stamps or stickers for assignments you had to perform in front of your teacher(s).
  • It’s forbidden to use mobile devices.

RULES for teachers:

• • Hand out the assignment sheet for students to each team. Make sure you place the paper upside down. The teams aren’t allowed to read the challenges yet before the time set. 
  • Set timer at 20 minutes and show the timer on your screen, so the teams can always see how much time is left.
  • Before you start, don’t tell the students about the aim of this challenge. At the end of the challenge you can reflect together with the students on why this activity was done and what skills they have used to perform it.

When the time is up, ask everyone to sit down. While you reflect on the challenge with the students, the other person checks the answer sheets and counts up the points. You can reflect the game using the tips mentioned below and discuss the answers of the questions asked during the game. Announce the winner, hand over the prize and wrap up the challenge by summarising the lessons learned. 

Your students must think about the number of skills they have used to play the game. You can ask the following questions: 

• How did you make decisions?
• What was your group dynamic? Did someone turn out to be a natural leader? 
• How did you determine the value of each task? 
• How would you score your group for teamwork?
• What would you do better next time? 
• Which skills came forward while playing this game? (Time management, Creativity, Teamwork, Delegation, Planning, Problem-solving, Decision-making, Taking initiative, Stress management, Strategic thinking)

Timer to show students how much time is left: https://www.timeanddate.com/timer/