Define cooperative play

When Does It Happen, and How Can You Encourage It?

Written by WebMD Editorial Contributors

Reviewed by Dan Brennan, MD on October 25, 2021

In this Article

• What Are the Stages of Play?
• Benefits of Cooperative Play
• How to Encourage Cooperative Play

Cooperative play is when children play together with shared goals. They may agree on rules and organize their play. It's the most complicated of the six stages of play. 

What Are the Stages of Play?

In 1932, sociologist Mildren Parten identified six stages of children’s play. All kids develop differently, so there are no set ages for each type of play. 

Unoccupied play. This is the first stage and prepares your baby for the others. Unoccupied play happens when your child experiences the world through their senses. They explore the world around them without any sort of organization. You may notice your baby picking up an object and chewing on it before throwing it down and moving on to another one.  

Solitary play. Your child is engaging in solitary play when they play on their own without paying attention to others. Your child is exploring, mastering new skills, and preparing to play with others. 

Onlooker play. You may think your child is feeling lonely or left out if you notice them sitting back and watching other children. But your child is learning a lot by watching during this stage. This is a normal part of play development. Your child is learning about social rules and relationships as well as different ways of playing.  

‌Parallel play. When your child is playing near another child but not with them, they're engaging in parallel play. There is no interaction. At this stage, your child is still getting ready to play with other children. They’re still practicing skills and building up to cooperative play.  ‌

Associative play. This is when your child starts to show interest in other children as playmates. They’re starting to practice what they've learned in the earlier stages of play. Children in this stage may all be playing in the same area and interacting with each other. But they aren't organizing their play around a common goal.   ‌

Cooperative play. In this final stage, your child is working with other kids toward a shared goal. Children will have rules about how to play and assigned roles. There may be a lot of arguing as they learn to share, take turns, and negotiate.  

Benefits of Cooperative Play

Play is an essential part of your child's healthy development. Some of the benefits of cooperative play include: 

• Improved language skills
• Improved attention
• Self-regulation
• Better peer relationships
• Learning to work with peers
• Adapting to the needs of others
• Learning to compromise
• Learning to resolve conflicts
• Improved physical development
• Developing problem-solving skills

How to Encourage Cooperative Play

Getting your child to play cooperatively isn't always easy. The key to success is giving each child a role so they have to work together. Here are some tips for encouraging cooperative play at home: ‌

Plant a garden. Let your child and their siblings or friends plan a small garden. They'll have to work together to decide what to plant and where to plant it. Encourage them to take on different roles. Be sure to point out everyone's contribution when the plants start growing. 

Create an animal hospital. Let your children drag out all of their stuffed animals and set up a veterinary clinic. Give them a clipboard, paper, and crayons to add writing practice to their game. The children can take turns being the veterinarian, the pet owner, the receptionist, and maybe even the pet. ‌

Put on a play. Bring out the dress-up clothes and let your kids put on a play. They can act out a classic fairy tale or their favorite modern book. Deciding who plays which role will give them lots of practice in negotiating and cooperating.  ‌

Have a parade. Making their own musical instruments will give your kids a chance to practice their creativity. Marching in a parade with their instruments will encourage them to work with their friends toward a common goal. 

What Is Cooperative Play? Definition, Examples, and Benefits

As children grow, they move through distinct developmental stages that impact how they interact with the world and the people around them. While parents are often quick to note developmental milestones like learning to sit up or sleeping through the night, there are also important social milestones your child will move through.

One such milestone is reaching the cooperative stage of play. If you’re interested in learning more about the stages of play, read on!

Cooperative play is the last of the six stages of play described by sociologist Mildred Parten. Cooperative play involves children playing and working with others towards a common goal or purpose.

Being able to participate in cooperative play is extremely important. It means that your child has the skills they’ll need later to collaborate and cooperate at school and in other typical social settings, like sports.

Cooperative play doesn’t happen overnight though. Before your child reaches this stage, you should expect to see them move through five earlier stages of play.

Unoccupied play

Unoccupied play, the first stage, is when an infant begins to experience the world through their senses. They move their body and interact with objects simply because it’s interesting or because it feels good.

At this stage, your little one enjoys things with interesting textures and patterns or items that they can touch or see.

Solitary play

After unoccupied play, children move into the independent or solitary play stage. During this stage, a child will play on their own with little to no regard to what other adults or kids around them are doing.

During this stage, your child might stack and knock over blocks, line up or move around objects, flip through a book, or enjoy shaking a noise maker or other similar toy.

Onlooker play

During the onlooker play stage children will observe the play of other kids while not actually playing themselves. Motivated by an intense curiosity, little ones might sit and observe others for long periods of time without trying to jump in and play.

During this stage your child is observing how play “works” and learning the skills they’ll need to jump in when they feel ready.

Parallel play

After mastering onlooker play, a child will be ready to move into parallel play. During parallel play, children will play beside and in proximity to other children without actually playing with them. Children often enjoy the buzz that comes with being around other kids, but they don’t yet know how to step into others’ games or ask other kids to step into their games.

You may feel awkward when you head to a playdate and it seems like your child ignores the other children, but often they’re just engaging in an earlier play stage like this one.

Associative play

The final stage of play prior to cooperative play is associative play. During associative play, children will play with one another but don’t organize their play toward a common goal. Kids might be talking, laughing, and playing together but have totally different ideas about the outcome of the game they’re each playing.

Your child and their friends may all be playing a game that involves cooking, but one may be a chef, one may be a daddy cooking dinner, and one may be making a snack for their dinosaur.

Cooperative play

Finally, after lots of practice communicating and collaborating, a child moves into the final stage of play, cooperative play.

You will notice your child has moved on to cooperative play when they can communicate desired outcomes with others and collaborate towards a common goal with each person having a distinct role to play.

While every child is different and will move through the stages of play at a different pace, in general, kids begin to engage in cooperative play between the ages of 4 and 5.

The ability to play cooperatively depends on your child’s ability to learn and exchange ideas and assign and accept roles in their play. Typically, children under 4 are not yet ready to share their toys for the sake of a game, to respect the property rights of other children, or to understand the importance of rules and bounds within a game.

You can encourage cooperative play by example. Play games that require taking turns, discuss assigning roles within play, and encourage communication and feedback.

Cooperative play allows children to work together towards a common goal instead of in opposition to one another or in pursuit of winning. Parents and caregivers can foster cooperative play by creating an environment with tools and games kids can use to work cooperatively.

Outdoors, children can work together to rake leaves, build a snow fort, or plant and tend to a garden. Children can also collaborate to use playground equipment or outside toys in a way that ensures that everyone gets the opportunity to play, like rotating between the slide, the swings, and the monkey bars.

Indoors, children can construct buildings and cities from boxes or blocks together or use figurines and dolls to act out shared stories. Children can also recreate scenarios they see in their everyday life, such as playing grocery store, doctor’s office, or veterinarian.

At this stage, children may also begin to enjoy more organized card or board games that allow them to work towards a common goal or point total. They may also enjoy collaborative work like building a puzzle together or painting a mural.

Encouraging your child to participate in cooperative play is important for fostering their long term social development. During cooperative play they can learn and develop a number of life skills that will help them get along with others and move through the world successfully.

During cooperative play children learn:

Cooperation

Cooperation is an essential life skill that children will use at home, at school, and in the community as they grow.

Play that fosters a sense of cooperation in kids shows them that working together allows them to have more fun and more readily reach their goal than working or playing independently.

Communication

During cooperative play children must express their needs and desires as well as hear and respect the needs and desires of others. Kids learn that if they don’t communicate or listen effectively, their play simply won’t be as fun.

As kids continue to grow and develop, they refine their communication skills through play and carry these skills into different parts of their lives.

Empathy

During cooperative play kids each have a distinct role to play in their game. As kids negotiate rules and roles, they learn that they must think from the perspective of others to ensure that the game is “fair” for all.

This recognition that different people experience the same situations differently is one of the earliest forms of empathy.

Trust

During cooperative play children assign one another roles to play and rules to follow and then must trust that everyone will comply. Children learn to value one another’s strengths and contributions and to trust that they’ll each participate in the agreed upon way.

Conflict resolution

Reaching the cooperative stage of play does not mean that children will never experience conflict when they play, in fact, playing cooperatively often creates bountiful opportunities for little ones to practice their budding conflict resolution skills.

As conflict arises, children must learn to effectively communicate the problem and to brainstorm compromises and solutions that are acceptable and workable for all parties involved.

Cooperative play is the final stage of play and represents your child’s ability to collaborate and cooperate with other children towards a common goal.

Children often reach the cooperative stage of play between 4 and 5 years of age after they have moved through the earlier five stages of play. You can foster cooperative play by setting up your home environment in a way that gives your child the tools and toys they need to create cooperative games.

Children learn through play and, as they play cooperatively with other kids, your child will learn essential life skills that they’ll use now and as they grow!

Factorio co-op is the best programmer interview we've had / Sudo Null IT News Obviously, inverting a binary tree on a board has little to do with the practical skills of a real programmer.

At our company, the most effective programming interview to date is usually some kind of homework assignment for several days, in which the candidate is asked to fix a bug or implement a small feature. This is not very good, because it takes a lot of time, and a person can get external help (or google if the function is common enough). On the other hand, some large companies have instead doubled down on whiteboard (and algorithm) interviews, exposing would-be engineers to many hours of online programming sessions with varying levels of invasive observation.

All of these interview methods don't compare to a very simple metric: playing Factorio together . Going through the entire Factorio cycle is an almost perfect indicator of how well a person solves common technical problems. You can even customize the playthrough based on your future position to better understand how the candidate will perform in their role.

Factorio is a game about automation. This trailer would probably be the best introduction, but essentially your job is to build an automated factory capable of launching a rocket into space.

Starting from scratch. Manually mine iron ore and stone, build a smelting furnace to smelt ore into iron plates that can be crafted into an automatic solid fuel drill. You can pick up iron ore from the drill yourself and put it into the smelter, but it is more efficient to use an automatic conveyor. You can then use the resulting iron to make another drill that automates coal mining. Then a conveyor is built for taking coal and a conveyor for its transfer to the drill. This tiny factory produces iron plates that can be used to make a third drill - and start mining copper ore, which allows you to craft copper plates, and from them you can make copper wire, which is necessary for the operation of a submersible pump. Combined with the steam boiler and steam engine, this gives us our first electric power. It can be used for a research center and the invention of new technologies, such as an assembly machine. Once you have unlocked the assembly machines, you can use the handmade wire to create an assembly machine that will automatically make these wires.

You'll eventually unlock trains, robots, and logistics systems to help you deal with the game's growing logistical complexity. Well, in the end you can launch a rocket into space.

The game starts with no set goal and almost no direction. The lead programmer must be able to study the UI and define a goal and then develop a plan to achieve it. The junior is expected to correctly complete the tasks set by the lead developer. The trainee is supposed to work with a mentor, but the junior should be able to fix major problems with their code on their own before asking for help from the senior. The Middle must be able to work independently once given the task, but is not expected to be an architectural designer.

Specific expectations can be formulated as follows:

• Trainee should generally be able to place a blueprint and connect it to something else, such as an ore deposit.
  
• juniors are expected to independently build a production line, albeit not optimal. They may need help from a senior developer on how to correctly route the conveyors to all intermediate assembly machines.
  
• Once the assignment is given, middle must design a nearly optimal production line (no beacons) with minimal supervision.
  
• The Lead Programmer does not need guidance, is able to set goals and develop an action plan himself, and then delegate these tasks to other programmers.

The most important aspect of software development is the ability to work in a team. This means coordinating efforts with other people, meeting the needs of other people's projects, and collaborating with a team, rather than working on your own when you refuse to change your design to help integrate it with someone else's work. Naturally, these situations happen all the time in Factorio because standard blueprints are limited by physical space. As a result, you need to scrutinize other people's actions, and sometimes adjust your design to fit within size limits or accommodate some other person's drawing that took up more space than expected.

If the player withdraws into himself, starts doing everything himself or silently fixing problems, this will quickly incur the wrath of the team for the same reasons that colleagues are angry with cowboy programmers. Luckily, Factorio has a built-in equivalent of git blame : it shows the last player who changed any entity. Thus, if someone put a crutch and did not inform the team about the problem, then when this crutch finally breaks, everyone will know who is to blame. If you want to win, you have to work closely with your teammates.

One of the main skills for a programmer is debugging. This is perhaps the most obvious parallel between Factorio and real software development. Something can break very far from the actual source of the problem. The ability to quickly figure out the real problem is a critical skill, and the process of thinking is almost identical to tracking down the cause of a crash in a real program. If the assembly machine stops working, you first need to check the outgoing streams. Then check which ingredient is missing at the input. Then trace the ingredient around the factory to find out where it is made. And repeat the process over and over, ad nauseam.

Debugging in Factorio gets tricky fast. As soon as you build an oil refinery, you will be engaged in cracking, where there are three different pipes (fuel oil, diesel fuel and associated petroleum gas) at the exit, and if any of them stop for some reason, then the whole plant stops working.

There have been times when the whole plant has stopped because you started to research something that does not require yellow science. As a result, you stopped using drone frames that were no longer supplied with electric motors, which used a lubricating fluid, for the production of which fuel oil was taken. As a result, the outlet pipe at the refinery was blocked, because of which you ran out of associated petroleum gas (petrolium), which stopped the production of plastics. As a result, the release of the signal red wire was stopped - and the entire factory went out of order. Experienced players anticipate such scenarios and implement self-balancing oil cracking to ensure that the system is always balanced. Such a plant will stop only if the outlet pipe with associated gas is blocked. If a good programmer is given a broken refinery, he can usually trace the problem back to its source, figure out what happened, and quickly try to find a solution. On the other hand, if a person just slams a couple of new tanks on the ground for no good reason (he is absolutely sure that lubricating fluid will always be needed), then this is a big red flag on the problem-solving methods in his programs.

Situations like these allow Factorio to accurately simulate the complex interdependencies that programmers typically deal with. The difficulty increases as new concepts are added to the gameplay. This is very similar to the increase in complexity from the extra layers of abstraction in debugging a crash that might have happened deep within one of the frameworks you use.

Often the original design needs to be tweaked to improve performance or throughput. Good programmers will not only accept criticism of their drawings, but will take it into account in future work. If they do not agree with the change, they will provide a specific explanation so that the team can more accurately consider the pros and cons of the proposed change.

Resisting feedback for no good reason is a well-known red flag. In addition, the programmer, who is reluctant to accept proposed changes and refuses to adjust future projects accordingly, causes wariness. As a result, he will have to constantly be reminded of the need to adhere to some standard way of solving the problem. At the same time, the person does not explain why he does not like the proposed method. This is potentially a time bomb in the organization because, left unattended, he can quickly accumulate technical debt for his colleagues. These kinds of problems are almost impossible to catch in a traditional interview, only in an internship.

Failure to follow advice is only part of a much larger problem when the programmer is not able to integrate normally into the existing structure. There are many ways to build a factory in Factorio, and each requires standard build methods. Failure to adhere to standards will quickly bring the entire factory to a standstill, often in subtle ways that are not obvious to the unwary developer.

The design of the main belt conveyor includes 4-8 conveyors divided into two sections (for underground conveyors). It is placed in the center of the factory and all production takes place perpendicular to the belt. This design relies on several rules, the violation of which can lead to complete chaos. First, you should always use a delimiter at the output of the pipeline. You should never redirect an entire feed: empty space for another feed means you lose an entire resource pipeline, even after an upgrade. Second, all plants must scale perpendicular to the main conveyor. Failure to scale quickly will result in either a huge wastage of space or a production line not scaling because it is surrounded by other production lines.

Logistics network

There are different ways to build logistics networks. The easiest one is with passive supply chests. But there is another method - storage chests with a filter, which solves the garbage problem. Both methods require the correct installation of limiters in the right places. Passive supply chests are usually limited by chest space. You need to put a manipulator to the storage chests to connect the chest to the logistics network. And provide at least N items before installing the manipulator. If these steps are forgotten, huge resources will be wasted. If programmer constantly forgets about the limiters on the outputs - this is a red flag that a person is careless about performance in real applications.

In other cases, the team may use pre-designed blueprints, such as the design of a nuclear reactor or a bot factory. They can be extremely complex, but if you make an effort on yourself and figure it out, they are extremely time-saving. Beware of candidates who don't want to set up a new item in the factory simply because they can't keep track of the complex control logic. Or who gives up trying to understand the algorithm of the functioning of such a plant, despite the obvious advantages of drones over conveyors.

Non-optimal drone factory design source

Trains in Factorio are a direct analogue of multithreading: one train is one thread of execution, and each train intersection or stop is a place in memory where two threads can potentially write at the same time. Traffic lights are locks (or mutexes). All bugs in the rail network manifest exactly the same as race conditions in software, because they are literally a physical race condition. All trade-offs apply here too - blocking too long reduces throughput. Incorrect design of traffic lights usually causes a deadlock, just like in software, because the result is a cyclical dependency of the locks. The most common deadlock is when a train is too long and unexpectedly blocks a second intersection while waiting to enter the first. This second junction then prevents another train from leaving, preventing the first junction from being unblocked.

The number of tracks in the railway network corresponds to the number of CPU cores. A single rail track is difficult to scale to more than a few lanes because the capacity of the entire system is limited very quickly, even with waiting areas. The most common design is the two-lane design, with one lane in each direction. There will be problems with capacity when it becomes necessary to constantly unload trains. Therefore, large rail networks have a minimum of four lanes, with the outer two acting as detours to avoid crossings whenever possible.

Problems with traffic lights in these systems can take a fantastic amount of time to show up. A single missed traffic light on one rail network once caused a deadlock after working correctly for two weeks . Similarly, in programs, a race condition can occur only once a month, when high thread contention occurs under heavy load.

As with software, Factorio's production scaling introduces new challenges to original blueprint design and often requires a complete overhaul to maximize performance, with the installation of productivity modules and speed modules with beacons. Conveyors become a performance bottleneck even at maximum belt speed, forcing you to look for ways to separate structures so that more belts can be inserted later, or split factories into modules.

Logistics network management itself becomes a logistical task at the end of the game due to the amount of problems that expansive drone networks cause. As a general rule, one would start segmenting the logistics network and either use trains to transport goods between segments, or build request and supply chests that would transfer goods across borders.

At the end of the game, train control requires moving from push architecture to pull architecture because push architecture cannot handle high throughput. This inevitably leads to using the Train Limit feature and learning how to use logic networks to code the underlying logic so that a station will only request a train when it's actually ready to fill it up with resources instead of the usual early game tactics of simply telling a bunch of trains to go. for iron. The new scheme minimizes the number of trains while ensuring that all stations are served on the network.

It is often the case that the limitations of the input lines to the assembly machine and the speed limits of the manipulator require the redesign of factories around, just as high-speed computing requires the knowledge of bottlenecks in the operation of the CPU. These bottlenecks are almost never a problem until you reach a certain scale, but after that they begin to limit performance.

Eventually, plants get so huge that they have to move away from a simple design with a basic conveyor belt or spaghetti design to a more scalable structure. To go mega, factories typically use either a train system or a modular system, which roughly corresponds to a microservices or plug-in architecture.

A train-based megabase is sometimes referred to as a "city-block" design, where trains around the factory blocks control all entrances and exits. Thus, each individual block is isolated from all the others, since all inputs are "clean" in the sense that they come from the rail network. This is almost identical to microservices (over HTTP) or inter-process communication (IPC) architectures, with similar potential problems due to I/O delays, since results cannot arrive all the time, they must be transmitted in "packets" or trains over the railroad network.

Modular architecture attempts to retain some semblance of a main conveyor, but instead separates the belts at the factory and uses modular blocks that accept standard inputs and standard outputs. Sometimes this can be achieved entirely with drones, but usually materials have to be conveyed over long distances. This is very similar to the module system for a monolithic application, with the same trade-offs.

These megabases represent the top level of the default Factorio server. Of course, there are many mods that make the game much more difficult.

Space Exploration is a completely redesigned version of Factorio for space colonization. This is where planets become resource constrained, requiring players to colonize other worlds and use rockets to transfer resources between planets. Due to the huge delay in the delivery of materials between planets, the coordination of these databases leads to problems similar to a globally distributed database system. Even in the logical network, latency has to be dealt with because the automatic system loses sight of elements that are launched but have not yet reached the target planet. If this is not taken into account, there are duplicate requests for all required items. Distributed systems face exactly the same problem when trying to ensure consistency between nodes.

In general, the software industry has no idea how to find and hire the best developers. Playing Factorio together was probably the best technical interview we've ever had. And confuses us a lot . Such an interview is wildly impractical, taking over 20 hours of multiplayer on the first try, or 8 hours for a team of experienced players. What can be learned from this? Don't know. Of course, we can't switch to Factorio as an interview method - we might as well just give the candidate homework.

But this is already better than a whiteboard interview.

Twelve business team building games your team will love

" Again stupid team building!" - you hear from a disgruntled employee. Well well. If such thoughts come into the minds of your colleagues, there will be no benefit from team building.

Team building and business games should not only teach useful skills, but also bring pleasure. They help team members get to know each other better - who thinks, works, solves problems and has fun.

We have compiled a list of 12 team building business games that will not make your employees unhappy - on the contrary, they will make you want to play them again and again:

Quick business games

Purpose: This game brings creativity to life and teaches creative thinking.

2. Pros and cons

Time: 5-6 minutes
Number of participants: two or more
Equipment: not needed
Rules: player A tells some unpleasant episode of his B to player B past (from personal life or from work). It must be an event that actually happened. Then player A again talks about this event, but only talks about its positive aspects. Player B helps find the positive side of an unpleasant situation. After that, the players change roles.

Goal: participants learn together to rethink negative experiences and learn valuable lessons from them.

3. Mixing goals

Time: 1-2 minutes
Number of participants: any
Inventory: not needed
Rules: excellent team office game that does not take much time. Before holding the meeting, ask each participant in the game to go around their colleagues and tell as many people as possible about what they are going to share in the meeting. If you wish, you can assign a prize to the player who will tell the maximum number of people about his plans, and to the one who successfully recounts what he told his colleagues about before the meeting.

Purpose: This team building option improves the efficiency of meetings and forces participants to think in advance what they are going to say, not what they want to hear.

Business games in the open air

4. Treasure hunting

Time: 1 hour and more break the team into groups of two or more people. Make a list of different wacky tasks for each group. For example, take a selfie with a stranger, take a picture of a building or object near the office, etc. Give each group a list and be sure to set a deadline by which they must complete all the tasks. The group that completes the tasks the fastest wins. (If you like, you can create your own scoring system according to the difficulty of the tasks.)

Goal: is a great team spirit exercise. It will help temporarily break up familiar companies and encourage collaboration with colleagues from other teams and departments. You will notice that project team management will become easier after this.

*Fun fact: in Wrike, we played a treasure hunt using our own quest tracking tool.

5. Ball

Time: 15-30 minutes
Number of participants: 8-20 people
Equipment: not needed
Rules: Place all participants in a circle shoulder to shoulder and facing the center of the circle. Ask everyone to reach out their right hand and take the hand of someone who is standing opposite. Then ask them to reach out their left hand and take the hand of another random person. For a certain time, the team must unravel this tangle without opening their hands. If the group is too big, organize a few smaller laps and have them compete against each other for speed.

Goal: Communication and teamwork skills are essential to success in this game. And after it, the participants will have something to discuss at their leisure.

6. Perfect Square

Time: 15-30 minutes
Number of participants: 5-20 people
Equipment: a long piece of rope tied with ends and a blindfold for each participant Rules

:

put the employees in a circle and give them a rope in their hands. Ask everyone to blindfold themselves and put the rope on the floor. Then ask everyone to move away from the rope a short distance. Next, ask to return to the rope again and try to lay it in an even square without removing the blindfold. To make the game more interesting, limit the time to complete the task. To make things more difficult, ask some team members not to talk.

Purpose: The game helps to improve communication and leadership skills. By asking some team members to remain silent throughout the game, you practice trust, allowing team members to lead each other in the right direction.

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7. Minefield

Time: 15-30 minutes
Number of participants: 4-10 people (even number)
Equipment: miscellaneous small items, some blindfolds
Rules: find an open space (such as an empty parking lot or park). Randomly place the items you brought with you on the ground (cones, balls, bottles, etc.). Divide the participants into pairs and ask one player from each pair to blindfold themselves. The second player must lead his partner from one end of the "minefield" to the other without touching any mines, using only verbal instructions. The blindfolded contestant must not speak a word. To complicate the task, define the routes that the blindfolded participant should follow.

Purpose: This game is designed to train confidence, communication and listening skills. It is great to play on the beach.

8. Eggfall

Time: 1-2 hours
Number of participants: two or more small groups
Equipment: various office items
Rules: divide into groups of 3-5 people Give each group one raw egg. Put together all the items you brought. Give the participants 15-30 minutes to assemble the protective packaging from the available items so that the egg does not break when dropped. You can take, for example, such items: scotch tape, pencils, straws, plastic cutlery, packaging material, newspapers, rubber bands. When time is up, drop eggs in a team-made protective package from the second or third floor to see which one survives this Epocalypse.

Goal: is a classic fun (and not the neatest) team game. Brings group members together using teamwork and problem solving skills. The more people involved in this egg mayhem, the more interesting! And don't forget to stock up on plenty of eggs, in case some of them break while creating the package.

Relationship building games

9. Puzzle barter

Time: 1-2 hours
Number of participants: Four or more small groups
Equipment: One puzzle for each group
Rules: Ask the participants to break into small groups of an equal number of players. Give each group one puzzle of the same difficulty. The goal is to complete the puzzle faster than the rest of the groups. But! Part of the pieces of each puzzle is in the other group. And each group must decide how to get them - through negotiations, trade, exchange of team members, etc. Whatever the participants decide, the decision must be made together.

Purpose: This game trains problem solving and leadership skills. Some players are more active, others remain on the sidelines, but it is important to remember that every decision of the group must be agreed with all its members.

10. I believe - I do not believe

Time: 10-15 minutes
Number of participants: five or more people
Equipment: not needed
Rules: ask participants to sit in a circle with each other. Everyone must remember three true facts about themselves and come up with one false one. Lies must be true. Then ask them to take turns telling three true and one false facts in random order, without saying which of the facts is false. After the story of one participant, the rest must guess which of the facts is false.

Purpose: is a great game to build contact, especially for newly formed teams. It helps to avoid jumping to conclusions about colleagues and gives introverts a chance to share something about themselves.

11. Drawing blindly

Time: 10-15 minutes
Number of participants: two or more
Equipment: picture, pen and paper
Rules: divide the participants into groups of two. Divide the groups so that their members sit with their backs to each other. Give one member of the group a pen and paper and another a picture. The participant holding the picture must describe it to his partner, without saying directly what is shown there. For example, if the picture shows a worm in an apple, don't say, "Draw an apple with a worm." A person with paper and a pen must draw what, in his opinion, is shown in the picture according to the description of his partner. Set the game time: 10-15 minutes.

Purpose: This game trains communication skills and teaches how to interpret information. When the drawing is done, it is always interesting to see how the drawing understood the descriptions of his partner.

12. Which is better?

Time: 15-20 minutes
Number of participants: any
Inventory: four or more items
Rules: choose four or more different items (or the same items that look different). Divide the participants into groups with an equal number of people. Think of a situation in which each group has to solve a problem using only the items they have. It can be anything from "you've landed on a desert island" to "you need to save the world from Godzilla." Ask each group to rank the items according to their usefulness in each specific situation and explain their choice.

Purpose: This game stimulates the imagination while solving problems.

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