In Fall 2016 I (Craig Armstrong) taught my students in New Venture Development (and myself) how to run a Google Ventures Design Sprint. The Sprint is a five-day exercise for solving problems or developing new products. One of my students in this class, Ben Tieszen, has been active in Lisa McKinney's HERD projectand has been to Haiti a few time this year to help Haitians develop business skills.
As a side project for the Design Sprint, I decided to build a game that could help Haitian kids learn skills in lateral thinking and creativity (something I learned is in short supply there). I developed a board game based on Guilford's (1959, 1967) alternative uses for everyday objects. I collected google images of "everyday objects" and had playing cards printed in Hong Kong with the pictures and their names in Haitian Creole. I made the board, bought an hour-glass timer, dice, and game tokens for less than $10. I sent the finished product with Ben and Lisa to see how kids would react.
The game is designed to help players develop skills in creativity and lateral thinking. The board consists of a 10x10 grid of spaces representing 100 combined ideas and dice moves. The cards present images of specific everyday objects for which the player must identify alternative uses. This part of the game rewards the creativity skills of the player. The dice introduces an element of chance to the game so that players don't end their turns prematurely (and opportunistically) only on ladders.
Each player chooses a token for moving through the board.Cards, dice and hour-glass timer are placed face down next to the board.Each player rolls a dice. The highest roller goes first. Play moves to the left.
The board contains several chutes and ladders based on the popular board game by the same name. A chute sends a player backwards on board; a ladder sends a player forward on the board. If a player ends her number of uses on a chute or ladder she moves back or advances based on the path of the chute or ladder. If a player ends a dice roll on a chute or ladder she also moves back or forward. I included the chutes and ladders to add an element of entertainment to the chore of coming up with ideas for alternative uses (and to make the game less painful for less creative players).
The first player to reach space 100 is the winner. Play may continue to allow the other players to reach space 100.
The following results are provided courtesy of Ben Tieszen, who took the game to Haiti and oversaw its play.
"We went through the board game with about 15 4- to 9-year-olds. Overall the children had fun, but the start was slow and the children seemed to lack the attention span to focus on the game.
"For the most part, they lacked creativity and the ability to come up with creative solutions. It is possible that the instructions were unclear and the translation was ineffective at conveying the true idea behind the game. My translator was not the strongest and had limited English vocabulary. However, the older students were more able to understand the concept from the beginning, which could mean the younger children have not yet developed the critical thinking skills necessary to come up with new ideas. This could be cultural or developmental.
"As the game progressed, the children seemed to understand what was going on more, but failed to come up with truly creative solutions. They were giving similar answers repeatedly with slight differences to get farther. Ex: a glass can hold oil, a glass can hold water, a glass can hold sand.
"The timer was a huge hit, and the time constraint was a big source of excitement and laughter. They would point out the time and yell at the other students to hurry up. Also, rolling the dice was fun and added a great aspect to the game. Given that a few of the students were illiterate, the pictures were a big help, but some items were foreign to them and some items were incorrectly labeled.
"The game went very slowly with six children. This would likely not be a problem with older children and children who understood the premise better. The very young children had trouble with their dexterity rolling the dice and moving the pieces.
"The adults who helped me understood the game and said it was a useful and good idea, and that it would work in the future.
"Overall I learned a good bit about it and would suggest improvements by increasing the age of students, reducing the number of students, having superior translators, and ensuring the printed cards are corrected."
This is one example of the types of experiential learning activities entrepreneurship professors are creating to help people develop skills through games. Click on the Find Out More button to see Experiential Entrepreneurship Education.