Thinking outside the box

This was game night Wednesday. The last week of the month we play games all night. Usually the games are messy and even a little mean. I enjoy it and the students tend to have a great time. I decided to play outside the box tonight. Everything was pretty well mental but not a straight up trivia test or anything boring like that. I started with 9 volunteers then thinned the heard over a couple of games and finished with a classic outside the box exercise.

Call a friend

The first game required volunteers with cell phones. This was most of the Youth but I got 9 up front and then asked for their phones. I then sent them down stairs where they couldn’t hear and had some other volunteers put the phones in identical brown paper bags. I think mixed it up so no one knew where anyone’s phone was. I then had my volunteers come up one at a time. They were put in a chair in front of the bags and told that their phone was in a big. To win all they had to do was pick the bag their phone was in. They could not touch the bags but they were permitted a single question which I promised to answer to the best of my abilities. Most of them asked “what bag is my phone in?” Unfortunately for them I honestly did not know so I gave them the best answer I could, “I don’t know.” They then randomly picked from 9 phones and each missed. 3 of them asked, “Can you call m phone?” or some variant of that. I called and they were able to figure out which phone was theirs when it started ringing. I’m not sure if there were any other questions they could have asked that would have given the correct location of the phone but that was the one I had in mind when I envisioned the game. Those 3 went on to play the next game.

It’s not lying when you play by the rules

This is a game I played back in high school in my sociology class, or something like that. Back then I remember it being really funny because of what happened when one guy was asking his girlfriend questions and getting all kinds of disturbing answers. The three winners were sent back down stairs. I then instructed the rest that the winners would be coming up to figure out the “rule.” They could only answer “yes” or “no.” If the person blinked while asking the question they had to answer yes regardless of what the correct answer was. If they didn’t blink the answer had to be no. Very simple rule but very easy to overlook. Anyways, the 3 went on for several minutes while everyone had fun at their expense before someone finally figured out the rule. This person went on to the final round.

Connect the Dots

A classic thinking outside the box exercise. If you haven’t done it then you need to. Take a piece of paper and put 3 dots in a row then put another row put 3 more dots and in a 3^rd row put 3 more dots. You should have a square with 3 dots on each side and one dot in the middle. The task is to draw a line through all of the dots. Easy enough but you can only draw 4 lines and you can’t lift your pen from the paper.

Did you try it? Let me give you some advice. Think outside the box.

Did you get it? Let me try and describe the solution. Draw a line from the bottom right dot to the top left dot. This will go through 3 dots including the middle one. Now draw through the top right about half the width of the whole box past the dot. You are now outside the box. From there draw through the middle right and middle bottom dots going past the bottom dot until you are under the left column. Draw up through the remaining dots and you are done.

My winner from the previous games did not do well with this at all. He didn’t even get close.

Anyways, that was the games for the night. I thought it was a nice change and everyone seemed to enjoy it. We’ll be having a messier version next time.