Red Alert

What can students learn from this?

The objective of this activity is to illustrate to the students some aspects that link motivation, differences in perception, points of view, teamworking and communication.

How can I do this in class?

The team has to face an emergency situation.There is a leakage in a container of radioactive material, and the radiation is spreading out little by little with the course of time. In this moment there is a contaminated area of 3 metres around the dangerous container; it is calculated that in 15 minutes the container will blow up and the entire zone will be contaminated, and probably, in a few days all humanity will die. The objective of the team is to pour a neutraliser material into the radioactive container before the time has passed, stopping in this way the contaminating process and avoiding what could be an ecological disaster.The group will have at first 25 tennis balls available. They have to put a minimum of 10 balls into the contaminated paper basket in order to neutralise the radiation. This is the objective of the group.

Conditions

The group has to be divided as follows: a) 2 directors: they can speak but they cannot move. They have to guide the group, giving them orders in order to achieve the objective. b) 8 workers: none of them can speak, and they will be blindfolded. In this way all of them have to work as a team, collaborating together to reach the goal.

• The balls that fall to the ground cannot be used anymore.
• Everyone must help and participate in the activity to work properly.
• There is a contaminated zone of 3 meters around the radioactive container, and it is forbidden to enter. Thus people who step inside the contaminated area or come closer than 3’ to the radioactive material will be disqualified.
• The neutralization receptacle cannot be moved. If the receptacle is moved or knocked down, some of the participants could be incapacitated.
• It is only allowed to use the materials provided.
• The team has 15 minutes to achieve the goal.

Reflection tips

To achieve the objective they must work as a team, coordinating and communicating efficiently. Usually the weak point in the performance is communication and information. Blindfolded workers do not know what the objective is nor what is happening during the activity. The fact of being mute and blindfolded is highly alienating and this can only be counteracted successfully with meaningful and continuous information. Anyway, this rather passive role shows the need for information, the need for participation and the demotivation that produces the lack of those things. Whether successful or not, they come back to their places and the phase of analysis begins. The analysis of this process should identify how/what the team performance has been in the light of motivation and its relation with communication in the context of teamworking.

After the activity, the group has to make its first analysis. The trainer will write down on the blackboard those contributions given by the participants. These contributions will help to point out beforehand the concepts that will be systematised.

Opening questions in this analysis could be:

• If the team has succeeded: What are the keys to success?
• If the team has failed: What are the keys to failure?
• In any case, to the workers and to the managers separately: How did you feel during the activity?

Questions such as communication, opportunity of being listened to, alienation, information, involvement, participation in decision-making, etc, can appear in different ways. The trainer must keep them alive and suggest systematising them “step by step” during all the following activities.

Relevant useful material

Article

A Winning Combination: Collaborative Teamwork Equals Teamwork and Collaboration