Tag: group games

Play Kahoot! without devices

If you work with kids in education, ministry, or some other setting, you need to check out Kahoot! I’ve spoken about it on here before and it is a digital resource for teachers and leaders who want to facilitate interactive trivia or feedback with their students.

One problem with using Kahoot! in venues with lots of kids, though, is that children do not always have devices on them (and arguably shouldn’t have devices on them in the first place).

So I want to share an idea with you that comes straight from my friend Evan Dickson at Concord Baptist Church in Anderson, SC. You can play the Kahoot! trivia game on a large projector screen for all the kids to see. Then, instead of the children having to answer the trivia questions on their devices, just have them pick an answer in their heads.

But how do you know what answer they are selecting? Just ask them to move to a corner of the room that corresponds with their answer (most of these Kahoot! games have four options for the answer). These options are coded by color and shape. You can even set up flags or some other indicator in each corner that shows the kids which color/shape corresponds to that corner. Congratulate those who selected the right answer and then move on to the next question. You can make the game questions roll along automatically at whatever speed you like in the settings. There is no need to keep official score. Just have fun with it.

It’s a simple idea, but brilliant! Thanks, Evan, for the great idea.

Do you have a great idea for games or activities with children? Leave a comment or send me a message and I’d love to share that idea on here too!

Awesome Crowd Game Ideas

I do a lot of large group events. I’m always on the lookout for games that are fun and easy for huge crowds. When people come together in large groups, there is a lot of potential energy that can be tapped in the form of socialization, laughter, competition, and shared human experiences.

So here are some of the resources I have found to be particularly helpful in leading fun experiences for crowds of people:

  1. CrowdControlGames

    This organization creates and sells (at super affordable rates) crowd games that you can run on your computer and then project on the big screen. Browse around at all they have to offer – http://crowdcontrolgames.com/

  2. Crowd Thumb Wrestling

    How about crowd thumb wrestling?! Invented by monochrom and officially called “massive Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling.” Here is that game led by a game designer on the TED stage…. [ted id=1866]

  3. Crowd Thunderstorm

    You can also lead your crowd in making the sounds of a thunderstorm. This video shows a choir on stage doing it. But you can just as easily lead an audience of any size in the same exercise: [iframe width=”640″ height=”360″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/29qaN0M0o0s” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe]

  4. Group Games Galore!

    I have also compiled a blog post category of group games over the years on this blog. There are over twenty entries and growing, so read through all these great crowd game ideas such as “Heads or Tails” and “Bring Me This.” Click here.

 

 

Easy Group Game: Mouthpiece Madness

I got this idea from a friend of mine at Camp Orchard Hill, Derek Hodne. I did some searching online and discovered that many other people have taken this game and packaged it into various retail forms, such as Watch Ya Mouth, Speak Out, and Mouthguard Challenge.

The game is simple, and you can do it yourself with a small or large group setting with a little creativity. The supplies needed are the plastic mouth spacers (cheek retractors) that dentists use to hold back lips and cheeks while they work on patients. You can grab a dozen of them on amazon.com for about $12 ($1 per spacer).

You give a player the spacer and they put it in their mouth. Then you give them a phrase to try to say and the other players have to decipher the phrase. The spacer makes it near impossible to pronounce words with sounds like “M”, “B”, “P” or other phonetics that bring the lips together. So phrases like, “Mommy buys peanuts at the market” can be both difficult and entertaining at the same time.

When my friend Derek administered the game, it was at a gathering of hundreds of high school students. He called up about eight players onto the stage and split them into two teams of four each. Each team had one player with the cheek retractor and the other three were the phrase guessers. It was fun for the rest of the crowd to watch as Derek held the microphone up to the teams while they played.

Try it with your group (large or small) and have fun!