All play and no work? Rescuing an away-day from blandness using Taskmaster and a lot of ducks
Lead Author: Malcolm Murray
Additional authors:
Timetable: ,
Description:
If you think “team away-day” your heart probably sinks a little. Bridge building over a cold stream. Hide and seek in the woods, but with people who don’t want to play this way. Or please, no, endless Post-its and flip charts. This session explores why it doesn’t have to be like this. In January I co-led a team away day, bringing together two different groups who hadn’t worked together long – let’s call them the “woods” and the “trees”. The standard away-day plan involves a lot of talking strategy and direction, but we weren’t ready for this – the team was still “forming” and “norming”. We had no budget and couldn’t afford a day out. In fact we could only get a room from 10 until 2pm. So not a day, not away. Disaster loomed. The solution was to turn the day into a playful Taskmaster-themed event, using elements of gamification to encourage mixing and co-operation. This was carefully designed so that creativity was rewarded and failure didn’t matter (we even took some ideas from past Playful Learning sessions – with suitable acknowledgments). Of course, in the session you’ll get to play Taskmaster, and then pick apart some of the activities as I attempt to justify them as work-related and suitable for both introverts and extroverts. I do think you can learn something about a team and your colleagues by asking them to paint a gnome, design a game, or suffer endless duck puns.
This session should appeal to people wanting to try playful methods in situations where the learning may not be academic as much as gaining people skills, forging a sense of identity and common purpose. It also helps if you like wax and pictures of yellow ducks.
References, web links and other resources:
The approach adopts a content gamification approach and so follows methods articulated by Karl Kapp (e.g. his 2012 book “The Gamification of Learning and Instruction”).
The game design task is drawn from Eric Zimmerman’s 2022 book “The rules we break” https://www.theruleswebreak.com/
The pasta anatomy task (this time we built a hand) was inspired by Suzanne Faulkner’s 2023 Playful Learning session “Learning foot anatomy with pasta and vegetables”.
If you have never come across Taskmaster, details (and a good source of digital content) can be found at https://www.taskmaster.tv/
All play and no work? Rescuing an away-day from blandness using Taskmaster and a lot of ducks
Lead Author: Malcolm Murray
Additional authors:
Timetable: ,
Description:
If you think “team away-day” your heart probably sinks a little. Bridge building over a cold stream. Hide and seek in the woods, but with people who don’t want to play this way. Or please, no, endless Post-its and flip charts. This session explores why it doesn’t have to be like this. In January I co-led a team away day, bringing together two different groups who hadn’t worked together long – let’s call them the “woods” and the “trees”. The standard away-day plan involves a lot of talking strategy and direction, but we weren’t ready for this – the team was still “forming” and “norming”. We had no budget and couldn’t afford a day out. In fact we could only get a room from 10 until 2pm. So not a day, not away. Disaster loomed. The solution was to turn the day into a playful Taskmaster-themed event, using elements of gamification to encourage mixing and co-operation. This was carefully designed so that creativity was rewarded and failure didn’t matter (we even took some ideas from past Playful Learning sessions – with suitable acknowledgments). Of course, in the session you’ll get to play Taskmaster, and then pick apart some of the activities as I attempt to justify them as work-related and suitable for both introverts and extroverts. I do think you can learn something about a team and your colleagues by asking them to paint a gnome, design a game, or suffer endless duck puns.
This session should appeal to people wanting to try playful methods in situations where the learning may not be academic as much as gaining people skills, forging a sense of identity and common purpose. It also helps if you like wax and pictures of yellow ducks.
References, web links and other resources:
The approach adopts a content gamification approach and so follows methods articulated by Karl Kapp (e.g. his 2012 book “The Gamification of Learning and Instruction”).
The game design task is drawn from Eric Zimmerman’s 2022 book “The rules we break” https://www.theruleswebreak.com/
The pasta anatomy task (this time we built a hand) was inspired by Suzanne Faulkner’s 2023 Playful Learning session “Learning foot anatomy with pasta and vegetables”.
If you have never come across Taskmaster, details (and a good source of digital content) can be found at https://www.taskmaster.tv/