Design Your Own Games and Activities : Thiagi's Templates for Performance Improvement

Rating:
Summary: Flexible, Adaptable, Effective Training Activities
Review: Long one of my favourite training game designers, Thiagi has given up all his very best secrets about interactive training in his book "Design Your Own Games and Activities."

Here you will find dozens of brief activity descriptions, 32 chapters, and 30 fully described training activities neatly compiled in one book. Need a better justification for this treasure chest? Fine--Thiagi describes 10 workplace trends that demand interactive strategies, including teamwork, learning organizations, and the changing characteristics of learners. The appendices include a glossary of 62 interactive strategies, indices of the activities in the book, and dozens of resources on everything from the design of interactive strategies to theory to workplace applications to websites on interactive strategies. Plus, a CD with the instructions and handouts for each of those 30 fully described games, ready for you to print off and use.

Each chapter covers a specific type of interactive strategy, and starts with an example. Thiagi then outlines the benefits, uses, and limitations of the strategy. Finally, one of those fleshed out examples is provided. Although the game can be played in a training session as is, you have enough information to adjust it to your own audience's needs. Plus the debriefing questions provided for each activity are extremely helpful.

I've used most of these activities, and found that this gem of a book has paid for itself many times over. TOP TIPS is an excellent game for sharing best practices. THIRTY-FIVE makes a great session review. TRIPLE-JOLT's Team Poker I is one of my favourite team-building exercises. QUICK DRAW illustrates cooperative creativity very well. This one volume alone can create the core for scores of training sessions--at a fraction of the price of many training activity sets available through other sources.

This one comes highly recommended.