New Hire Training Experience

Game Description:



1. In a closed door, there will be a circle, and 30 numbers in the circle.

2. Each team (about 10 people) need to take number out of the circle by ascend order.

3. Each team has 30 minutes and 3 tries, each try is limited in 90 seconds, after 90 seconds the team need to get out of the door.







My Experiences:



1. At the beginning, all of our team members thought the number will be Arabic digit, such as 1, 4, 100 and so on.

We don't know the range of the numbers, so we discussed about how to sort the 30 numbers quickly, and we also confused with the game rules, all of us thought that we need to take out a number in turns, we thought each person need to take a number out by ascend
order. So, we decided to sort all the numbers by the first person, and then all the resident person could take out a number quickly.


Then, we had the first try.

When we entered the door, we were really surprised, there were not Arabic digit, but some numbers showed in the following pictures:

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Some of the numbers are really hard to recognize, such as digit 15 is expressed by "Food" on the card, because "Food" in Chinese is “食物”, and then pronunciation of "食物" is similar with digit 15. Some cards are arithmetic expression, some cards are some shapes
that need to statistic the edge or angle.

As a result, in 90 seconds we only picked out 7 cards.



Note: this may like the project development, when we face a new project, we only new very few useful information, when we begin the developing work, we encounter many problems.

When we first saw the "numbers" on the card, the emotion may be denied or Fear or Anger, and even maybe someone would felt be fooled.



2. The second try: with information from the first try, we made another strategy, each person will be responsible for 3 or 4 cards before him, then we take the second try.

But, in 90 seconds, we only picked out 17 cards, because some card are hard to recognize.



Note: by this try, all of us changed our emotion from frustrated or anger to acceptance and hopeful. We believed that we could finished the task in the third try.



3. The third try: we discussed some unrecognised card, and the took the third try.

But,  game designer had substituted 3 or 4 card, the same digit but not the same picture, all of us discussed that we remember the picture of each number ,then we could pick out them by order quickly, but some pictures changed.

For example, digit "5" in first try and second try is a shape with 5 edges, but now it changed to logo of Channel, which means "element number 5", it wasted us a lot of time to find "5".

Luckily, we finished the task in 90 seconds.



Note: The change of digit, it maybe the same as the requirement change of a project, especially when the project is nearly finished, suddenly there come out some requirement change.

When we found we could not find number 5, most of us got frustrated, and thought maybe something is wrong, maybe the game designed got wrong, we also thought we could not finish the task.


In Software Engineer, when the project is near finish, suddenly requirement change will surprise developers or even frustrate them, developers begin to think there must be something wrong, or may think user are fooling them.

After a large amount of time searching "5", we found it and then we accept the face that some number were changed by game designer, our emotion changed from anger to acceptance and even relief
or interested, and then we finished.



So, this is the Transition Grid of Change. (I think it's really interesting game to do team building!)