Thursday 25 November 2010

Pirate Training Day

Yargh! Shiver me timbers and hoist the main sail! Light the cannons and climb the rigging! I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if Eureka! didn't hold a plank walking shivaree of a corporate event.

As much as I’d like to, I’m not going to write this whole post in pirate style. I will however write about how I spent most of my day as a pirate at the beginning of November. And believe me, I enjoyed it very much.

On 1 November, Eureka! opened its doors to staff members from a local primary school, coming to take part in one of our fun-filled corporate team building days. This was the first corporate event I had done at Eureka!, and we were trying out a new piratical, shipwreck board game-style activity that I had been working on with our Business Development Manager. It was a completely new game, and I was a little bit nervous.

Team building here starts with a few ice-breakers, and it’s ‘getting to know you’ for everyone on the course and us Enablers who are helping out for the day. This group was big enough we could split them into two groups. One group, with Enabler Jennie, got to put their engineering heads on and try their hands a spot of car building. The second group came with me as I transformed myself into my pirating alter-ego, ‘The Captain’, complete with foam cutlass. Yargh!

As ‘The Captain’ I quickly put my ‘new recruits’ through an intense spot of pirate training to sort out the scurvy and the sea sick before the terrors of the seven seas! I can happily report that all new recruits successfully graduated the training camp and earned themselves a place aboard my ship, the ‘Slippery Eel’.

It was then time to put the new game to the test. The Slippery Eel had been hit and was sinking. With only one life raft, the ‘crew’ had to decide which items to rescue from the sinking ship and take with them to a desert island where they would have to survive until rescue. Each item had pros and cons, an amount of space it would take up in the life raft, and a certain point value that only I knew. When each team had decided what they would be taking with them, I gave them the point sheet, and whoever had the most points would win the game. Sounds complicated I know, but believe me its not, and it was incredibly fun, and quite a success. I then put their teamwork skills to the test by getting them to build a catapult to protect themselves whilst on the ‘desert island’.
Exploring the galleries on a corporate event!

After a quick swap round of groups and repeating the pirate games, the teams then took to exploring the galleries and answering questions about them in the ‘Gallery Challenge’.
For my first corporate event, I was really happy that the whole day was, in my opinion, a great success.

Ben Guilfoyle is an Outreach Enabler at Eureka! The National Children’s Museum

For more information about corporate events and teambuilding at Eureka! please visit the Corporate Events section of our website.

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