We had some extra fun at a Sasuga! Presentation Skills workshop the other day with Teamcation. I first heard of Teamcation when the inventors of the activity – a group of international school girls aged from 11 to 12 – emailed and asked to interview me as a “communication expert.” They were participating the First Lego League World Class Learning Unleashed competition.
As one element of a three-part challenge, they had to design an activity to help with communication. The girls visited my office and demonstrated the activity. I was impressed – so much so that I offered try it out in one of my workshops.
In Teamcation, players work in teams of three. Each team has a speaker and two listeners. The speaker has a photo album with pictures of the inventors posing in pairs. Some poses are quite simple, such has holding hands in the air and lifting one foot each, while others are more complex, for example with one of the players being upside down. The speaker is assigned a photo and has to instruct the listeners to form that pose without seeing them. The listeners can only listen and cannot ask questions.
The workshop participants loved it. As well as being fun, Teamcation highlighted some important points applicable to presentations as well as other types of workplace communication, such as
– think of the other person’s perspective
– give the big picture first and then explain the details
– speak at a pace that allows the listeners to keep up
– repeat important points that might have been missed
– conclude with a recap of what you want the listeners to do
If you’d like to know more about Teamcation, please drop me a note here, and I’d be happy to forward that to the inventors. And, great news! The girls got through through to the regional level. So best of luck to Erica Loomis, Wenyu Lu, Ayaka Nakasuji, Manami Otsuka, Yoshie Shimura, and Sea Tanaka with the rest of the competition!