3b. Challenge Course (9/29)

What We Did: After talking to a lot of people prior to the challenge course at the University Outdoor Recreation Center, most were reluctant to participate – mainly because it was going to last 5 hours and we all had a lot of homework. When we got there we were split into two groups of about 20 students. This was still fairly close to the beginning of the school year so I didn’t know that many people in my group. I also didn’t know our trained facilitators who would be leading us through all the team activities that evening. Therefore, I was kind of dreading the night and hoping it would be over quickly.

The first activity was an icebreaker to learn each other’s names. The facilitators were trying to loosen us up but everyone still seemed pretty introverted. It wasn’t until we played the marble game that people started to communicate and work together. We had to transport a marble into a bucket about 30 feet away. But we could only transport it using a certain amount of differently shaped tubes cut in half. What we had to figure out was a system for keeping the line of tubes continuous. We established that the last person to have the marble roll down their tube would have to run to the other end of the line as fast as possible in order to prepare for the marble to reach them again. This seemed easy enough at first, but we quickly encountered more problems then we had anticipated. First of all, our group was made up of many people of different sizes. Therefore, the tall people would be passing a marble to a short person and cause the marble to acquire much more momentum due to the higher slope it traveled down. Any time the marble was going fast it would fall on the ground and we would have to start all over again. It was funny because even though we tried to work out all the faults, someone would always mess it up still. Eventually we learned how to keep the marble rolling slow and steady until we finally made it into the bucket.

Another challenging team-building activity we had to do required us all to have our eyes closed at all times and pretend we were blind. Each of us was handed a shaped block, and a few people were handed two. The facilitator that handed us our block told us what color it was. We were all told that there were 4 blocks of each color and 3 blocks were missing. None of us could look at our block or open our eyes, but the challenge was that we had to determine what shapes we did not have. This was an extremely challenging exercise because we had to give descriptions without using vision, our most relied on sense.

Aside from the team building activities, there were physical challenges for us to complete as well. First we were taken to a 15 foot wall and were told that all of us had to somehow get onto the other side of the wall. Most of us just stood there in disbelief because it was so high. The rules were that each person could only give a boost to someone else twice. We strategized that the smallest people should start because they can help boost other smaller people. We don’t want to waste a big person’s muscles on boosting a small person, because we need the bigger muscles to lift the bigger people. We ended up lifting each other according to size and it worked out the best that way.

Lastly, we were shown to the vertical challenge course and taught how to work the harnesses. At first I didn’t think I was going to try to climb it, but then I figured I would regret not trying. I didn’t expect to get to the top; I just wanted to see how far I could go. Much to my surprise, it turned out to not be as scary as I thought. I ended up reaching the top pretty quickly, so I’m glad I pushed myself to abandon my comfort zone.

 

Key Takeaways and Future Applications: In the end, I’m really glad I got to participate in this challenge course. It seems like a daunting task at first when you are told to solve problems with a bunch of people you barely know, but the group facilitators made sure we had fun with our activities while keeping them physically and intellectually challenging at the same time.

As I did more exercises I started to get more comfortable around my group members, thus I was more willing to make suggestions in the activities. I find that when I’m in an environment where I don’t know many people, I tend to keep my ideas to myself. I think this special class session allowed me to at least partially combat that insecurity because basically we had to communicate to survive. I realized that the more ideas are shared by people in the group, the more easy it will become to solve the problem.

I noticed that one of my peers emerged as a leader in the colored block simulation. It was interesting to me how all of us went into the activity knowing the exact same amount of information, but that some people have natural leadership qualities and others have followership qualities. All of us deliberated for a few minutes trying to figure out a strategy, but no one was really listening to each other. One person who had a good idea spoke up and took charge for the remainder of the activity. I learned from this that just because someone is a leader, that doesn’t necessarily mean they know more than you. Anyone can be a leader as long as they have the courage to take risks and make the first move.

My favorite part about the whole day was reaching a new level of comfort with my classmates. The physical challenges helped instill a mutual trust between us. I had to trust that the others wouldn’t drop me when belaying me over the wall, and they had to trust that I wasn’t going to fall and land on their faces. Once we were forced to break the awkward physical barriers between each other, nothing was weird anymore. We spent the whole rest of our time at the challenge course laughing and joking around with each other.