TEACHING TEAMWORK PLAYFULLY ONLINE:

This month, Rational Games would like to showcase our good friends and partners Larissa Menocci and Adam Ambrozy of MakeTeamwork, a boutique training and consulting company focusing on intercultural teamwork.

Newly founded just last year, this new startup consultancy instantly focused on the unique challenges of teams working together remotely. They do far more than seminars, but rather offer a wide variety of creative and custom-made team development activities training agile working methods with an entrepreneurial perspective. Adam’s experience as a serial tech entrepreneur combines with Larissa’s expertise as a communication design specialist results for some very powerful teamwork indeed.

We came together working for a client looking to train teamwork in an online seminar. To that end, Adam and Larissa have developed a powerful new online game called Cakes4Kids. Using the interface of the award-winning www.mural.com, this playful platform takes online learning way beyond whiteboards, and is truly a thoroughly modern visual collaboration tool.

The game Cakes4Kids takes 120 minutes to play and offers a highly interactive and engaging experience as teams work intensively

to create and deliver premium birthday cakes for kids, including packaging, decoration and other elements. Cakes are created, decorated, packaged, labeled, placed in a refrigerator for cooling and finally delivered. Using a state-of-the-art Kanban board the players quickly learn self-organization and discipline, the importance of feedback loops and the value of team retrospectives.

There is lots to like about this game.

First, the visually attractive format makes it an aesthetic delight to play: the layout, colors and appealing combination of elements truly stimulate the imagination. You feel like a kid again yourself.

Second, the game offers ample space for reflection. In each of three rounds, the teams are encouraged to take time to reflect on their performance and how it could be improved – and it is, dramatically, with each ensuing round.

Finally, very much in the spirit of Rational Games, this is a collaborative game far more than a competitive one. While the teams do race each other to the finish line, mostly they are playing against the clock and a common goal of providing top quality to the customer, even learning from each other. Together, they raise the bar on both quality and speed.

Comments and feedback welcome!