The Name Game is a collaborative learning exercise which accomplishes a
variety of important things:
- It makes you learn your students' names quickly and it makes
your students learn each other's names quickly.
- It creates a sense of fun and involvement in the early weeks of the
semester.
- It demonstrates that collaboration has advantages over working
in isolation.
Lots of professors play a variant of the Name Game, but my version is based on
what I call "the group mind" technique. I tell the students that we have three
weeks (or three classes or whatever) to learn each other's names and that we
are all responsible for insuring that everyone does it. I explain that cultures
all over the world have developed strategies for insuring the social distribution
of knowledge, such that if one person is lost, the knowledge is retained
somewhere else in the group (you can skip this step if you teach, say,
engineering and don't want to talk about fuzzy stuff like culture). I encourage
them to help each other in the learning process.
Start by having seven to ten students introduce themselves and then ask an
individual in the group to name other individual: "Luke, which one of these
people is Rick?" "Rick, point to Susan." "Susan, what is the name of the
person sitting next to Attila?"
If Susan doesn't know the name of the person next to Attila, I'll say, "Ask
Attila" or "Ask Luke!" In doing it this way, I can keep everyone on his or her
tiptoes, because anyone might be made responsible for an answer at any time --
and everyone knows that someone nearby can be counted on for help. No one is
made to feel stupid, because the entire group helps out.
At the beginning (and sometimes at the end) of each class in the designated
period, we play The Name Game: "Susan, is Attila here today?" "Bob, what is
the name of that woman coming in the door?" "Kathy, point to two people named
Mike."
This is also a nice technique to interject into the middle of a long class,
just to shake up people's minds and get their attention revved up.
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