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Do you use brainteasers to start your training day or to refocus or energize your learners after breaks? Brainteasers have multiple benefits, such as:
- Increasing creativity
- Adding fun into your training course
- Building rapport between the learners as they work together to solve them
- Refocusing and re-energizing your participants
Here are four ideas to keep in mind when choosing brainteasers to keep your learners coming back for more!
1. Use a variety of brainteasers to keep your learners engaged and successful. For example: riddles, mathematical problems, spatial and logic puzzles, pop culture, wordplay, cartoons, and simple magic tricks. Make them fun but keep the organizational culture in mind as well. Our learners are diverse and may come from different generations or cultures, or have different native languages. Their interests and personalities are also diverse.
Be aware when choosing language-based puzzles, such as anagrams, that English may not be everyone’s first language. These kinds of brainteasers may pose a barrier for some of your learners and have the potential to create frustration.
2. Include music and movement in your training sessions to encourage your learners to be active after a work session. Quick games with friendly competition are often well received!
3. Adapt favorite puzzles to fit your needs. Share your puzzles on a flipchart or on a PowerPoint slide to present them to your learners. Another way to adapt brainteasers to fit your needs is to embed course contentwithin them. For example, share a cartoon and ask the learners how it relates to the concepts in the training or take a traditional puzzle idea (e.g. crossword puzzle) and incorporate course content within that format.
4. Try Pinterest and YouTube when you’re looking for more brainteasers to use during your training sessions. There’s lots of inspiration there!
Next time you’re looking to add a bit of fun into your training day, think outside the box and add brainteasers. They’ll delight your learners and motivate them to get back to work!
Check out Langevin’s Maximizing Engagement in the Virtual Classroom workshop for more creative ideas to add to your bag of training tricks!
