Team-building is an effective way of boosting morale in the education sector. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, team-building activities have moved online to digital spaces.
The most effective virtual team-building activities are those that embrace the use of games on interactive digital platforms that tutors and students can use to facilitate learning.
The top digital team-building games for students can be utilized in online classrooms to bring fun to learning and ensure better academic performance.
1. Virtual Book Club
Through the use of a virtual book club, reading might be turned into a social activity. A shared book is read for leisure at a similar speed by all members of these virtual clubs, who meet regularly to discuss it.
These students convey their viewpoints in a lighthearted manner, with each viewpoint valued as a unique point of view.
2. Ice Breakers
In virtual classrooms, tutors generate a list of icebreaker queries for students to respond to, numbering each one.
Students then roll the dice using an online dice-roller and respond to the questions it lands on, which is a terrific way to discover fun things about someone.
The Brown University, among other writing and tutoring centers like Wr1ter.com, encourages their tutors to use this strategy on students.
3. The Escape Game
In this game, students use their digital dashboards, 360-degree room scanning, and an inventory system to move through a room and find clues.
Students are divided into 5 to 7 secret agent teams that compete to unravel the mystery first by determining the best course of action. The game is won by the first team to catch the infamous art thief, Vincent Hahn.
4. Trivia Games
There are various virtual trivia game possibilities, but Kahoot! is one of the most entertaining and popular ones since it is fascinating.
Tutors can choose a theme that corresponds to their class and create a trivia game around it. Trivia games are perfect for virtual classrooms since they are low-impact and simple to implement, with minimal disruptions to the classroom.
5. Shark Tank
A professor divides the class into teams and asks them to develop an innovation or solution to pitch to the sharks in this virtual game.
To actualize the chosen project, students must work together, boosting collaboration. The game also helps them improve their public speaking skills, and those chosen as sharks can pick the best presentation once everyone has given their pitch.
6. Detective
In this game, one student is appointed as the detective and put in a separate breakout room as the rest pick a leader.
When the detective returns to the main room, the leader has already performed a hand motion that the other video call participants have imitated. Without the detective catching them, the leader will have to swiftly switch to other motions.
7. Pictionary
In this game, players compete against one another to properly recognize a picture drawn by a member of a rival team.
One team member can display their screen to the entire class via video conference, which may find it more difficult to recognize whose artwork is displayed on the screen. A document camera can also be used by professors to exhibit drawings gathered earlier.
8. 3 Things We All Have in Common
The tutor divides students into small groups at random, assigns them to a group, and gives them a set amount of time to come up with things they all share in common in this breakout group task.
To be acceptable, their common things must be specific and applicable to all of them. This virtual game works best on the Zoom platform.
9. Pin the Map
Students design a class map using Google Slides or a similar platform in this game. They can use black pins to show where they are from, green pins to show where they have traveled, and red pins to show where they want to visit in the future. The class can then keep updating the map, with each student sharing stories on their travels.
10. Name That Song
In this game, students or groups of students choose a song whose title they must express with a chain of emojis.
While one student copies and pastes the emoji chain into the chatbox, the other students must identify which title the emoji symbol sequence represents. This game is especially fun when the titles being presented are popular songs that everyone knows.
In conclusion, team-building games are an effective way of boosting morale in learning environments, making them an essential addition to digital school curriculums and virtual classrooms.
Some online tutoring and writing centers are using this innovation to ensure that their tutors and students are more productive when working together on digital platforms.
When the education sector effectively applies digital team-building games in the virtual classroom environment, the work output of students is higher, guaranteeing high academic performance.
