Creating Connection Through a Virtual Breakout Game | Tangram Flip Series
April 10 | Written by Tim Reed & Julie Dozier
Tangram flips the script with a highly interactive breakout group activity that caps an otherwise self-paced learning journey with social learning and connection.
Our client came to us with a challenge: Design a breakout group activity in a culminating virtual learning event where small groups of participants will practice 2 key skills: collaboration and delegation. Oh, and:
There will be 2,000+ people in each virtual session.
Participants will not know each other and will be from different countries and cultures.
This group activity will be the main opportunity to connect with other learners in this primarily self-paced journey.
Our Approach
We organized a workshop with our SME group to brainstorm the activity and make some decisions together. In that session, we decided:
The activity would be about 25 minutes. Any shorter, and the learning might not get deep enough; any longer, we’d lose them.
The experience needed to be game-like. Ideally, the activity would have a fun spirit, create energy, and offer some choice.
We would design for a target group size of 4-6 people. But the experience would still need to work with a few more or less people.
The interactions should prompt human connection and sharing. Somehow, we needed to build trust and invite learners to open up to strangers about these topics.
The activity also needed to be flexible. All of these 100s of small groups in each session might be completing the activity at wildly different paces.
Armed with our design decisions, we moved forward to prototype some ideas.
Our Design Flip
We set a high bar for ourselves with this activity design. In typical Tangram style, it needed to be simple to design, quick to create, and easy to experience. It also needed to foster actual learning and create connection among strangers. Our goal was to make something fun and meaningful with minimal development time/cost.
So, what did we do?
First, we wrote 4 collaboration/delegation scenarios and turned each one into a good-better-best question. Learners would work in their small groups to agree and submit their answer. The game would award them points, giving them max points for a perfect answer.
Then, we added a quick series of icebreaker questions at the beginning. Learners would earn points for sharing details about themselves, with a mix of normal and playful questions.
We also added some questions inviting learners to share personal best practices. For these questions, 2+ learners would share their personal approach or a tip for the group in order to get the points.
Also, to deepen the dynamic, we invited learners to be vulnerable:
For one of the skills, we asked learners to rate themselves on a 1-5 scale and share why with the group.
We also invited 1+ people to ask the group for advice about a current challenge.
Finally, we needed to infuse the activity with a game-like energy and the feeling of choice. We created a cute spinner that would appear random but was designed to deliver the questions in our desired sequence. Learners would also be able to skip a question if they wanted and come back to it at the end.
The goal was to keep all groups engaged for 25 minutes – some groups might finish all the questions and others might only finish a few. Either way, they would have the social learning experience we wanted.
The Results
We built a PowerPoint prototype of our game to test with a group of sample learners. We divided them into 3 groups and gave each learner group a different sequence of questions so we could test slightly different experiences. Each group had the same directions and had to figure out the game themselves; they also had a designer spy in there to observe and prompt them if necessary.
We learned so much from this test! Some of our key takeaways included:
Where to include more support and better directions
What general sequence of questions worked best to spark conversation
Which questions needed to be tweaked for clarity
The feedback and ideas helped us refine our design quickly and finalize our script for our developers. And we’ve met our primary objective: We’ve vetted our simple but effective game that uses social learning to spark new ways of thinking about collaboration and delegation. It’s the perfect lightweight group activity for our virtual event.