Play the telephone game
If you're looking for a great icebreaker activity, this easy and fun game may just be the answer. Especially for online learning environments or meeting, different game modes provide a great variety of applications. You can also use the game for many other subjects.
In one of the most basic forms you can use it as an icebreaker activity following these steps:
- Various people join the game via a link the organiser provides.
- Everyone draws an image (e.g. what they had for breakfast, what their city is famous for, where they went on holidays last...) in a predefined time frame.
- Once the time is up, all participants will be shown an image which was drawn by another participant. They will have to describe this image in a short phrase (you can also limit the description to 3 or 5 words).
- Once everyone has added their description, everyone will be shown the description of another person - now it's time for everyone to draw again. This time everyone will have to do their best to draw the (3 or 5 word) described scene.
- Once the time is up again, participants will get to describe yet another image of another participant...
These steps get repeated until everyone had a go at describing everyone else's image - if you have too many participants, you may want to reduce the number of rounds to be played (in pre-game settings).
In the end, everyone will watch together the progress from image to description to new image and so on. It can be quite hilarious and provides great opportunities to chat and get to know one another.
The game can be found here and has many settings to individualise it to your particular needs. Have a play around with it to figure out how you can best use it.