Last Wednesday I ran my new workshop exploring collaboration for the first time – exploring the context of Higher Education. Because this was the first new workshop in a while, I really wanted to stretch myself and try some different things, which is why we did a lot of co-creation. So far in my workshops people are encouraged to be active, draw or make things, sometimes work together, but this time we co-created a game board (using a circular bar-type area at one of the flexible learning spaces in our venue, the Catalyst building at Staffordshire University), as well as Challenge Cards – all centred around practice and resources within Higher Education.

Some thank yous: to Eleanor for being such a great collaborator on this and helping every step of the way, to Lydia for joining Eleanor and myself on the journey of writing the chapter that inspired part of this, to TILE (the Teaching Innovation and Learning Enhancement hub) at Staffordshire University for their admin support – and sorting out the refreshments, and to everybody who came to make this such a special afternoon – and make this a lovely last day at uni for me!

We had three stations set up (plus the refreshment station, which was laden with pastries, cakes, and scones, cream and jam, plus coffee, tea and soft drinks): the Name Tag Station, where coloured pens, stamps, tape and stickers invited participants to make their own name tags (the idea had been to bring in business cards and transform them in a creative way, but there were also blank business cards to use, in case people hadn’t brought cards).

Then there was the Project Station, where participants were encouraged to think about projects they are involved in, know of, or are planning – and share them by making a ‘space’ for the game path. In practice this meant writing the info onto an A4 piece of light card – and then adding it to the bar to form the game path. (We had pre-prepared some of those, to get us started).

On the Challenge Station, participants were asked to write a challenge they had encountered or were grappling with on Challenge Cards (again using the business card format/size), and then add them to a pile on a pre-prepared space on the game board.

We took about an hour to co-create the game in that way, and people were chatting with each other from the get-go, which was great to see, as this was not simply about mapping the field (as the listed projects do), but really about having the opportunity to network with both colleagues and people you might not have met before.

Then it came to playing. There were two starting points, where we had provided dice, and the idea was that people would roll the die, and then move around the board based on the numbers they rolled and ‘collect’ the spaces they land on as resources in their toolkit. We had provided cards to make notes, or people could have used their phones to take pictures. There were two special spaces – the space with the Challenge Cards and a Silo Alarm (a button that when pressed alerted everybody to get out of their silos and start talking to somebody they had not talked to before). This part of the workshop maybe wasn’t as clear as it could have been, and if I do this again, maybe I should have pre-prepared written rules for people. I had been thinking about this, but then thought that might be too descriptive. Lots of people went round the board and looked at some (or all) the spaces. And lots of people looked at the Challenge Cards. And some did use their collected spaces as tools to try and help solve the challenge they randomly picked – and then tried to find the writer of that challenge and have a conversation about that. Mostly I think people just talked to each other, though, but to be honest, that was my main rationale for this workshop – give people a semi-structured activity to get them talking. So I’m happy with it 🙂

The feedback was great! Only one person stated that they didn’t feel like they got out of their silo, but lots of people said that they did make new connections, so I feel like everybody had the opportunity to do so.

Things to consider for next time: I had wanted to do more with business cards. We had asked people to bring in a stack of their business cards (if they had any), but due to an admin mix-up that email only went out the day before the event, too late for most people. So I decided to cut that part on the day. The idea had been to also have spaces on the board that were sort of Networking spaces, with a stack of shuffled business cards from attendees, and if you land on one of those spaces, you take a business card and then later try and find that person. It also would have been great to have more than one space for the Challenge Cards or find a different mechanism for getting them to people, because landing on that one space was very unlikely. Maybe this would work better, if the Challenge Card is something people pick up with the die at the beginning of their round?

Overall, this was a great day, and I am glad that I had the opportunity to run this workshop – and that I had so many people turn up who were happy to engage with something a little different. If you were there, please let us know in the comments which spaces and/or Challenges stick in your mind!