Creativity Exercise: Make a Monster

Purpose

This is a template for a creativity exercise centred on making monsters. It can be used for kids and adults depending on how you bias it and setup the exercise.

You can consider assigning the task to groups for an exercise on teamwork, teambuilding and management or run it individually for focus on creativity.

Ideally, you should run this exercise as a competition between participants to keep it fun and focused.

Objective

Create a monster out of the materials provided.

What You Need

• You have a choice over the materials based on how you want the final monsters to look like and also depending on your delegates. Example sets:
  • Textile, cut cloth, threads, ribbons and similar.
  • Bolts, nuts and disks.
  • Lego
• A copy of the Score Sheet for each delegate.
• Prize.

Setup

• Run the exercise individually or in groups based on your choice. If using groups have a maximum of two or three people in each. Larger group sizes are not ideal for this relatively simple and subjective exercise.
• Provide the materials to everyone.
• Explain that each person/team needs to create a monster out of the materials provided. This is a competition between them. Their monsters will be scored on:
  • Originality
  • Effort
  • Elegance
  • Scariness
  • Cuteness
• Allocate 30 minutes for them to create their monsters. Since all resources are available to everyone you should moderate their use. If you think it can create conflicts, either give each person/group a standard set or alternatively use the possibility of conflict as an opportunity to teach interpersonal skills.
• After the allocated time, stop everyone and bring them back together.
• Distribute a copy of the Score Sheet to all delegates.
• Ask a person/team to show their monster to others. Ask them to briefly explain what worked and what challenges they had while making their monsters.
• Ask everyone to score the demonstrated monster.
• Continue to another person/team until everyone has presented their monsters and got them scored.
• Use the score sheet to calculate an average score and find which monster got the highest score.
• Declare the winner and give a prize.

Timing

Explaining the Exercise: 2 minutes

Activity: 30 min + (5 min * n) = 60 minutes for 6 delegates/teams

Group Feedback: 10 minutes

Discussion

Who made the best monster? What did you think of the monster making experience? Whose monster appealed to you the most? Who was very creative with the use of available resources?

Score Sheet

Team/Person Name: _________________________

Rate the following from 1 to 5 (poor to excellent).

Originality:

Effort:

Elegance:

Scariness:

Cuteness:

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