Activities
For Core Values, our coaches gave us activities each session to do to increase team connectivity and help us use Core Values more often. This was to help us excercise teamwork and other critical skills involved in being a team like communicating, participating, respecting and many others. We started doing this a few weeks in as we needed to settle the people that were new to First Lego League in and going on an excursion to the Powerhouse Museum to start on our eventual project.
The first of the numerous activities which we did was recreating a Lego model from verbal instruction, with two different "teams" separated by a wall and door had to verbally communicate to the other team who then had to construct it in a way that was told, and had to ask for clarification when it was needed. While this happened, Andrew & Jaron (Who was a temporary team member for 1 session, but backed down to mentor due to HSCs) found a 'loophole' in the instructions, which was that we were only told to have 2 identical models once we decided we were finished. They deconstructed the model they were given, which was a loophole that was then punished by the coach because it had some features that he wanted us to study for future attachments.
The week after, we tried communicating by sorting cards. While it may seem simple enough, we needed to communicate and let others help by communicating to each other and , which was a bit of a challenge. We first tried it, but there was little participation involved and there was no apparent plan other than to "go with the flow". We of course had constructive criticism, to which we made a plan and tried again. We achieved a much quicker result and there was more participation levels with the whole team getting involved.
The first meeting after the October school holidays, we wrote down 5 distinct but cryptic things about ourselves, put them in a hat and then drew from the hat to get someone else's list. We then had to guess who wrote these things, then check with that person. We all got each others things, so either it was too easy, we are bonding more as teammates or maybe even both. It just goes to show that we are building our team together, getting to know each other more and are able to work together more efficiently now we know our teammates a bit more, and especially compared to the start of our Core Values when we had a bit of a miscommunication to now where we can effectively distinguish people's identities,