Wimbeldon

So in our Engineering class we did team building excercises recently as a way to become better problem solvers and to learn how to work in a group. We will be doing these team building excercises often now and we started off with a tennis ball challenge on Tuesday.

What we had to do was allow everyone to touch the tennis ball in the shortest amount of time, whichever team won a best two out of three was declared the winner. We were given a few minutes to prepare and it was obvious that each team quickly went to work determining what was the easiest and fastest way to complete this challenge.

Both teams though soon realized that they were using the same idea because it was the fastest. The idea was to drop the ball off of someone's hands and hold everyone's hand beneath it in a cylinder formation. As the ball would hit their hands they would move them out of the way allowing the ball to continue moving downward and touching everybody's hands.

After each team had a few test runs they were getting their times to near the same amount. I am sure there was difference but it was basically negligbile for the environment we were in.

I personally enjoyed the challenge the way it was, however it could use some harsher parameters. For example; everyone must touch the ball twice, the ball must be in the air, you have to be a certain distance apart, you can't use the same design twice.

Those are just some ways to make the challenge more interesting instead of it devolving into the same thing each round. It was like a Marvel match, I mean after everyone discovered the best team in the game, MSS, it was all you saw. Of course there was some variation but it was harder to win with them so most people didn't even go for the challenge.