Story time: Communication Games

Story time: So last year in French class my teacher decided on a couple of fun activities for us. The first (and the least enjoyable) one we did the first week of school. He handed us a text written in another language that was written with the Latin alphabet, but that wasn't one of the languages that we spoke (English, Spanish, German, and English). He asked us to guess what language it was written in, and we finally (after many wrong guesses) figured out that it was written in Polish. I know, I previously had no idea what Polish looks like, but it turns out that it's really different from French.

He asked us what we could know about the text. Our immediate reaction was to say that we knew nothing about it; it was written in a language that we didn't understand and to be annoyed that he asked us to do a seemingly impossible task. He told us to look on a smaller scale and to start by figuring out what kind of a text it was. It was of the right form to be a letter, so that was the answer we decided on. My teacher told us we were right and asked us what we the knew about the first and the last lines. If it was a letter the beginning had to be something along the lines of “hello [insert name]” and the last ones probably were “love, [insert name]” We managed to figure out a few words from their roots, and that was enough to understand a little bit of what was going on in the letter. Essentially, this was letter from a class of school children to their parents and it was about their trip to the zoo and a costume party that their parents were invited to.

I know that you're probably wondering what this game had to do with French. We were too, until the last day of school when the teacher explained it to us, and it all started to make sense. The idea was that we would have to decode the text which was good practice for when we would have to understand a text in French that had words that we didn't understand.

The second exercise we did was a little easier to understand. One person had a whiteboard marker and the others all had to work together to give them instructions for how to draw an object and the person holding the marker had to guess what it was. Sounds pretty easy right? It's not. The problem is that it's really hard to be specific enough. At the beginning we would say things like, “draw a circle... draw a rectangle... now draw a triangle”. It didn't work very well. The problem here, we figured out, was that we weren’t telling them anything about where these shapes went on the whiteboard or how, proportionately they were supposed to be. If you're trying to draw a duck and they eyes are bigger than the head and on the other side of the whiteboard it doesn't work. We started being more specific but we figured out that if we were too specific nobody could figure out what we were tying to say. For example, if we tried to tell them in centimeters where to put things and how big they were people couldn't remember and we weren’t allowed to repeat a million times.

The goal of this game was to work on our communication skills. We had to learn to communicate clearly and to say what we wanted to say and not to leave out information.

What I've learned from these experiences is that you can't always immediately tell whether something is educational, and that information can come in many forms.