Exercise 1.5. – Chinese sticks

Educational objective	The students are trained in the skills of team players. They experience what it means to have to depend on others, and others having to depend on them (interdependence).
Resources	Chinese sticks or pencils, biros, etc. (approximately 15 cm long).

The class is divided into groups of about eight students. The groups are told that they are to cover a certain distance (if possible, the exercise should be done outside the school building).
The groups stand in lines, with a distance of about 1-1.5 metres between them.
The students take their Chinese sticks (or biros, pencils) between the tips of their forefingers. The sticks now link the students together.
Now the groups must race to a goal that has been set beforehand, for example the classroom or the other end of the schoolyard. If two students drop their stick, the whole team must return to the starting point and begin again from there. The teams are free to develop the best technique and strategy to move swiftly to the goal without dropping the sticks.
Depending on how difficult the task proves to be for the students, these rules can be applied more or less strictly

Some students can act as external observers who can comment on the way the groups co-operated with each other.
The activities can be filmed to show different forms of behaviour.