The second monday trip organised by the Norwegian Outdoor Education students was held next to the university. The focus of the day was in team building exercises and therefore we were divided in 4 teams. The first task was to build a shelter and a fireplace using a tarp and what we could find nearby. The teams were a mix of international and Norwegian students, and the idea was that the more experienced Norwegian students would instruct us on how to build it correctly. We were given 0.5 hr to build it and after that we would go through them all and judge everyone’s shelters. The best team would win a price.

My team started by searching a good spot for the tarp and once we done that, we started putting it up. Almost everyone had ideas how to put it up the best way, and I noticed that the loudest people got their way (including me). Our team wasn’t working that well together and everyone was doing their own thing as we didn’t discuss the plan beforehand and just started working. We managed to build the shelter and the fireplace in time, but we misunderstood the task and instead of building a shelter for a day, we made it for staying overnight.

Our shelter was the first one to be judged and the other teams gave us feedback of what they would’ve done differently and then gave us a grade between 1 and 10. Being the first ones to present our shelter, we got a lower grade than I would have thought we deserved. The competitive factor of the exercise resulted in downgrading the other teams. The way we judged the other shelters was by everyone shouting a number and then the organisers picked the one they heard the most. It was fun to evaluate the other shelters and point out their flaws but for some people it might have been slightly upsetting to be judged so harshly.

After all the shelters were graded, we were given 15 minutes to improve our shelters according to the feedback. The improved shelters were graded again and checked if we managed to perfect them. The second round we were judged last and after tightening our tarp we got a good grade. As all the shelters were decent the winner team was the one with most decorations. To my opinion this was not the best way to decide which one was the best shelter. It seemed like only one person from the organising team knew how to actually build a shelter and the rest of them were more or less just tagging along. This gave the impression that the activity was not really planned together.

After taking down the shelters we had a team building game. We were to build a tower consisting of all the stuff we had with us. We had a time limit of 10 minutes. All the teams had different approaches to the task. For example, our team rolled all the rucksacks inside the tarp, and whilst this created a high tower, it fell over before the evaluation, so we didn’t get any points.

While the day of building shelters was fun, the team building aspect was not really clear. If doing the same exercise again I would try to assign everyone roles from the start instead of just rushing into the task as this would spare time in a long run.