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Telephone!
Learning Objectives
📞 Telephone Gameplay
Arrange participants in a line or circle. This game works best with 5 or more players and must be played in person.
The first player whispers a message to the next person. Each subsequent player whispers what they heard to the next person. The last player says the message out loud.
Compare the final message to the original to see how it changed.
Set a timer for minutes per round. Play a couple of rounds with different starting messages and message passers.
Facilitator Check in questions
Guide participants to reflect on communication challenges and strategies
- What happened to the message as it traveled through the group?
- What techniques did you use to remember the message accurately?
- How does this game relate to real-world communication challenges?
- What strategies could improve message accuracy in this game?
- Can you think of a work scenario where a similar communication challenge might occur?
Evolve the game
Introduce variations to increase complexity and challenge
- Round 2: Use a more complex message, such as a short riddle or technical instruction
- Round 3: Allow each player to ask one yes/no question to the person who whispered to them
- Round 4: Introduce background noise or distractions during message passing
- Round 5: Split into two teams and race to pass messages accurately, comparing final results
Demo Time!
Learning Objectives
You have two main goals for today:
Make your demo in 5 minutes
Appraise your peers’ demo, asking questions if you have any.
Your demo
- ⏱️ A timekeeper should keep time and call the teams in a random order.
- 🪧 Make sure your presentation is up and running.
- 🫣 Do some nerve-calming exercises so you feel more confident.
- 😅 Smile.
- ✨ Present amazingly.
Morning Break
A quick break of fifteen minutes so we can all concentrate on the next piece of work.
Retrospective
Learning Objectives
Retrospective is about celebrating what is going well, identifying what isn’t going well, and agreeing on actions to improve your team processes.
Be honest and kind when talking about the examples.
Our retrospective
Open the chosen board.
Give everyone to add their points. Use 1 sticky note per point. Do not write more than 1 sentence on a note.
Start reviewing the examples.
- Usually, we start with the positive ones first.
- Ask the person who wrote the example to give more input to the group
- Open it up for questions and detailing
- Agree on an action for that example, if applicable.
- Write the action on the board
- Define who in the team will be responsible for delivering it
- Agree on a deadline.
Example cooldown board
Cooling period (optional)
Solving conflicts as part of a team
Conflicts are part of life. It can occur more often in high-pressure moments, such as delivering a product in a short period. It might happen at any moment in the week, but the retrospective usually brings them up more clearly.
Team conflict
If you see that you and your team struggle to collaborate, communicate or work together positively, and conflict is getting heated, you can use this cooling technique:
Stop working and take a 5-minute break.
Reflect on what you think is working well and what is not working.
Discuss your preferred ways to communicate.
Re-establish how you will work together as a team.
Create a 5-step action plan about how they will resolve further challenges.
Individual conflict
If the conflict is about one specific individual, they must talk to a volunteer about the following:
Their strengths and weaknesses.
Reflections on how they will work together with the team.
Clear action plan to resolve further challenges.
This must be done so the trainee can work on the team again.
Sprint planning
Learning Objectives
Agile software teams often work in ‘sprints’: specific chunks of time where we commit to a development goal.
Goal: Get the homepage working.
We set a single goal and focus on reaching it together as a team.
This helps us work on the most important thing. We’ll have lots of ideas for different things we can build, and we don’t want to get distracted. And it should encourage us to work together as a team.
For this project, we’ll be doing 1 week sprints. So, we should plan and start a new sprint at the start of each week.
Sprint planning is the process of planning our week, specifically focused on our development backlog and picking which user stories to include. exercises:
Plan the sprint
As a group, review the Backlog of user stories on your Project Board
Discuss the user stories - make sure they all have a detailed description of what you need to build and check that everyone in the team understands them. You can check this by asking everyone - would you feel comfortable implementing this yourself? (if no, check why not and add more information)
Arrange the user stories in priority order - put the most important ones first. These stories should help us reach our MVP and solve customer problems faster.
Start moving the user stories from your Backlog column to the Prioritised column. Keep going until you have enough for a week of work - this is your ‘sprint’. Estimating how much you can do in a week might be tricky. Tip: not enough is better than too much. We can always add more later.
Describe your week of work as a goal in a single sentence. Keep it focused on your product, not the technology. For example, “Goal: Get the homepage working” is better than “Goal: Setup the SQL database.”
Post your goal to the class Slack channel, e.g. “This week’s sprint goal for the Amazing Coderz team is: Get the homepage working!”
Community Lunch
Every Saturday we cook and eat together. We share our food and our stories. We learn about each other and the world. We build community.
This is everyone’s responsibility, so help with what is needed to make this happen, for example, organising the food, setting up the table, washing up, tidying up, etc. You can do something different every week. You don’t need to be constantly responsible for the same task.
Team Development
Learning Objectives
This time is set aside for you to work together as a team to make progress on your project. Don’t waste it.
Here are some activities you can do during this time:
🗂️ Options
Pomodoro
Pomodoro
Learning Objectives
Each team member, take a small-scoped ticket. Set a timer for . Use this focused time to complete your ticket and open a PR.
⌛ Time’s up! Take a break! Make a cup of tea. Walk around a bit.
Now set a new and review each PR as a group.
⌛ Time’s up! Take a break! Make a cup of tea. Stretch! Look at how much progress you made in one hour. ✨
Blockers
🚧 Blockers
Learning Objectives
Identify any blockers or dependencies in your project. What must be done first? What can be “decoupled” and done in parallel? The better you can identify these, the more efficient your team will be. Discuss these blockers as a team and decide how to solve them while you are all together and can help each other.
Describe your blocker
Describing the problem systematically will take you most of the way to resolving the blocker. Use the following template on a ticket on your board:
- What you did: Describe what you have done so far. Give links and code snippets.
- What you expected: Describe what you expected to happen.
- What actually happened: Describe what actually happened.
Blockers can feel frustrating, but in reality they are opportunities to explore and solve problems. This is what engineering is all about. 🌱
Pair Programming
Pair programming
Learning Objectives
- Switch between driver and navigator roles after
- The “driver” is the person typing on the keyboard, just thinking about what needs to be written
- The “navigator” reviews what the driver is doing and is thinking about to write next
- Don’t dominate - this is teamwork
⌛ Time’s up! Take a break! Make a cup of tea. Good job, partners!