“Robot Factory” is a fun team-building ice-breaker that gets kids creative juices flowing. It scales well for groups of different sizes. It involves no supplies or preparation. I’ve found it engaging for middle school to high school age youth.
The objective of Robot Factory is for each team to work together to communicate what their product is to the other team, without using words.
The minimum group size is six students, so you have two teams of three students each.
Instructions
- Assign group into two or more teams of about 3-5 students each
- Each team’s challenge is to create a robot assembly line that produces something, with each person acting as a robot in the process. I typically give them 1-2 minutes to come up with their assembly line and assign roles. Adjust this based on your particular group, making sure they feel the pressure to come up with something quickly.
- Each robot can / should make a noise, but can’t speak. The funnier the noise, the better!
- The other teams have to guess what they are producing. The first team to guess gets one point.
- Product Ideas:
- A teddy bear
- A bowl of spaghetti
- Sushi
- A bicycle
- A cappuccino
- A burrito
- To start each round, one member of the guessing team activates the factory and it runs until the product is made. The robot team keeps cranking out products while the other teams shout out guesses.
- Switch teams until every team has gone once. Repeat if desired.
Discussion
This ice-breaker is fairly self-explanatory. It works well with a group of students who don’t know each other well to get them working together quickly. Shy students can still participate without having to speak. It’s a performative activity without putting any one student on the spot for very long.
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