Okay, you have a bunch of teenagers, and they don't really know each other... what do you do with them?

Skip has already attacked the "getting know you" aspect in his thread, mine is more on the breaking of barriers...

Game #1
1. Take one Explorer and sit them outside.
2. Blindfold him.
3. Get a number of other Explorers to sit down.
4. Bring in the blindfolded Explorer and guide him to the seated participants.
5. He has to identify the Explorers by feeling their knees - only their knees

Game #2
This actually came from one of my Explorers, but is great at reducing barriers that new (or old) members will have:

Sit everyone in a circle
Everyone puts their left hand on their neighbour's right knee, and their right hand on their neighbours left knee.

Start going round in sequence, tapping on your neighbours knee (you go in order of knees).

Introduce rules - a double tap means reverse direction, a triple tap means skip one... we haven't needed to do more than that.

If someone makes a mistake (doesn't tap when they were supposed or tapped when they weren't), they have to withdraw the hand that they made the mistake with. If both hands are withdrawn they are out of the game.

When you are down to the last two players, they sit facing each other - left hand on the other's left knee, and right hand on the other's right knee... first mistake is the loser.

In the beavers we do a simple "My name is ....... and Im sitting next to .......... ".

Id first give everyone a name badge, stick them into patrols, or whatever they are called in explorers and do some sort of team based challange, like the egg or bridge challange


EGG - Give lots of newspaper, strawers, a baloon and sticky tape to each patrol. Give them an egg, that they need to protect using the resources provided. Once the eggs are protected, go outside and each patrol throws their egg over a wall, onto a concrete slab. Once all have been thrown, take them inside and get the patrols to retreave the egg. If the egg is intact the patrol take their egg to the leader, if not, stick it in the bin. An intact egg means the patrol have completed the challange

BRIDGE - GIve lots of newapaper OR strawers and sticky tape to each patrol. Set up two tables per patrol, with a gap, that can be made larger by the patro, but not smaller. The patrols have to construct a bridge from one table to the other. THe bridge must be self supported on the table tops. Once the bridges are complete, get a tape measure and measure the span of the bridge, the one with the biggest span is the winner. You can also test the strength using bricks, or somthing similar.

I like the bridge idea - I'll be taking that back to my troop so thanks. Previously we'd done a similar thing with straws etc just trying to get the greatest height.

Ive done the one with straws before, but I don't think it was in scouts.

you could make them build catapults in teams and see which team wins, this means they have communicated well

Thats a good idea. I think I might have done that once many years ago.

Welcome to Scout Forum BTW.

A game I use occasionally with scouts and I've seen it work with Explorers is to get each person to stand on chair forming a long line of chairs. Then you tell them without stepping off the chairs to sort themselves into first name alphabetical name order. This involves a lot of physical interation and they have to know each others names, a variation is do it with surname or middle name.

Photos of us playing this game can be seen at Southon Meeting DIY Part 2