I’ve been playing around with an idea to get  my Year 10 students to think about games and how to run them.
I’ve always been a fan of inserting popular culture references into my teaching, and one particular TV show captured my attention last week. Master Chef Australia is on at the moment, and it saw a segment that inspired me to try something new (for me, anyway).

I call this the MasterCoach Mystery Bag Challenge, based on the MasterChef Mystery Box Challenge.
Not seen MasterChef?
I’ve Tube Chopped a short video to give you the idea….

What I do with the kids is get them to work in groups of 2 or 3. I grab a bag of random sport gear. Markers and bibs are standard. It has to include an item for moving around between the players (ball, frisbee, bean bag etc) and some props (hoops, speed ladders, etc) that may or may not be used. I then give the bag to the group.

A MasterCoach Mystery bag

The group then has the time it takes for the rest of the class to clear the change room and have the roll marked to set up their activity.  Based on the Mystery Bag contents they can use what they want, and devise a set of rules as well. They usually have between 5 – 10 minutes to get set up.
When the class comes to them, they have to explain the rules, run the class through a warm up and basic intro to their game.

The instructions are given

The game they devise runs for 20 minutes – during this time they can modify games aspects of the game or rules where necessary.
During this time, I ask the group members Game Sense style questions (What would make this work better? What would you change if you started over? What did you find tricky?). So far some of the conversations have surprised me with the depth of understanding and thinking from the kids.

The game is played

I also had a thought. This could be made even more interesting by using Jarrod Robinson’s Spin It app. You could give the group a chance to spin up random warm ups or activities to be included in their session. You could do this well in advance or for extreme planning stress, just before they start.

Give it a crack – I’d love to hear your stories on how it went for you, or about variations of the activity that work for you.

Jonesy