Communications - School Activity or Youth Game

I have used this activity many times with high school students. It is done as a race, with as many teams as you wish. It based on the old game of Telephone, where a phrase is whispered from one person to another, generally with the ending having little similarity with the beginning.

You can have a number of stated objectives with this activity: to investigate various forms of communication, to transmit a coded message, to listen and forward a message accurately, etc. It can also be used as a form of subject review by substituting words or definitions for the messages described later.

Step 1 You Will Need...

You'll need as many pairs of communications devices as you can find - or at least, as many as you want to use.

In my classroom, I used pairs of tin can telephones, walkie-talkies, and Army field telephones. As each pair of devices requires a pair of operators, three of them require six people on a team. Most of the time, you will have an odd number of people, so you can use them as runners, taking the original message to the first team member, and receiving it from the last.

There is a good chance you won't have a set of field phones. In this case, you can add more tin can phones, and if necessary more walkie-talkies. Unfortunately, the more radios you have, the more goofing around the students will do; that seems to be a natural result. Additionally, a pair of radios for each of two teams requires two different channels; two pairs require four channels, etc., which requires some thought. The simplest way of keeping students from being on the wrong frequency is to write the frequency and tone on a piece of tape and stick it to the back of each radio as you set them up. That's still not going to guarantee they won't deliberately be off the channel.

Everybody knows how to use tin can phones, but you need to remind them anyway - keep the string tight. They just don't work with a droopy string.