Schedule for today: team building activites

Building a shelter

Another monday, another day spent with our norwegian fellow students. This time, we were supposed to engage in team building activities together. We split up into four groups mixed with international and norwegian students. Our first task was to build a tipi for our group. Altough the exactly requirements for the tipi had been slightly imprecise, we’ve had about half an hour to build a shelter consisting of a campfire and a place for everyone to sit under a tarp. We were allowed to use knives, tarps, ropes and everything we could find in the forest to complete the task.

After half an hour, every team had to present their shelters and explain their intentions while building that specific shelter. As it’s been advertised as a competition and creativity was supposed to give us some extra points, we added Miss Piggy to our shelter as well as some nice decorations 😉

After everyone got an impression and overview of the other teams shelters, we’ve been given time to improve our shelters based on the advises and ideas of the judges and the norwegian students.

We tried to shelter the sides from the wind, pulled down the backside of the tarp a bit and removed the fireplace closer to where people supposed to sit, aiming to collect and reflect some of the heat from the fire underneath the tarp.

Tower building competition

Our second task for today consisted of another tower-building-competition between the four groups. Each group had to build a tower solely consisting of the items inside everyones backpacks within several minutes.

Todays schedule had been the first attempt to observe, discover and experiece the dynamics of a group working together as a team to achieve a common goal. I can only talk about my team, but we’ve had quite a strong teamworking. After a short discussion about what our roughly plan was, everyone started to participate and had been working   on either pulling up the tarp, collecting stones and wood, making a campfire or for example looking for useful objects that might help us build the shelter. Same applies for the second, tower building, task. Quickly all of us were trying to set up the tower. Someone mentioned to idea of using the backpacks a reasonable foundation. Luckily, we’ve had pretty much a good agreement among us, no one really leant back.