The lack of interaction in the classroom presents the issues of bored students, decreasing grades and lower attendance in the classroom. Smart instructors try fun group activities to increase the interaction level and interest in the classroom.

Why do you require Fun Group Activities for College Students?

Making a connection is one of the biggest challenges for teachers in the classroom.

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This lack of connection creates a gap between the teacher and the students.

For a 40-year-old teacher, iPads can seem fascinating and a great gift to humanity. But for the 20-year old students, the gadget has been there always.

Similar gaps of thoughts between teachers and students require a bridge. And fun group activities can help build that bridge.

Of course, group activities are about students working together as a team. But it also allows the teacher to understand the core perspectives of every student in a class.

With that, a teacher can decide his or her approach to teaching.

In many cases, you come across student groups that stay reserved and don’t interact even with each other.

Such groups require an energetic environment of learning to become more interested in learning.

Here come the effective group activities that help those college students.

Now, let’s discuss some effective and fun group activities to help your college students learn better:

1. Assignment in Motion

Students of a theatre group never feel bored or isolated. The whole idea of a theatre group is to come together and perform as a team. So, why not bring a theatre group experience to your classroom studies.

No matter if you teach physics, advertising or literature, you can turn any subject into an act of a play.

First of all, divide your students into small groups. Then, ask them to come up with a scenario based on the topic learned and demonstrate that scenario by acting.

So, if you have discussed the solar system, ask students to choose planets as their characters can create a story around those characters. So, students can come up with characters such as “an angry Sun”, “A silent moon” and “A happy earth”.

Similarly, if you teach literature or advertising, you can ask students to demonstrate a story or an advertising campaign in groups.

This group activity is fun and allows students to collectively learn. As they engage with all their senses, the attained knowledge makes a strong imprint in their minds.

2. Building Card Towers

Group activities can also help in teaching students to communicate with each other and respect a healthy competition.

For both the purposes, you can utilize this great group activity with your college students.

Building card towers is a group activity, which will require you to divide your students into groups of an equal number of members.

You can include clauses such as the tallest tower will win a prize. At the same time, ask students to talk slowly, so that, they don’t interrupt other groups.

This group activity is perfect to boost creativity in the students and allow them to face difficulties in a collective manner.

3. Puzzle and Quiz Challenges

You can turn your topics into puzzles and create a fun quiz, which would require multiple people to solve them.

Know More: 14 Fun Classroom Activities for Students

For this, you can create 5 to 10 puzzles and divide each puzzle into 10 clues. Then, mix all the chits of clues in a bowl and allow students to randomly pick their chits.

After that, it is every student’s responsibility to match clues with every other student to find all clues that are related to each other.

This way, students will have to work and search to build their own group.

When all the students find a group, they can work to solve their puzzle by finding a collective meaning behind each clue.

This activity gives a feeling of treasure hunt and mystery, which engages all students in the form of groups.

4. What’s Your Problem?

Students like complaining, especially when it comes to teachers and their strict demands.

You can use this common habit to allow students to indulge in a group activity.

“What’s your problem?” is a game based on open-ended queries. You ask students, “What’s your problem regarding…….?”

For example, you can ask, “what’s your problem regarding this assignment?”

Then, the first student can say his or her problem regarding the assignment.

Now, the student next to the first one has to provide a solution for the first problem and raise another problem regarding the assignment. The cycle keeps on going on till every student gets an answer.

This activity generates critical thinking, problem-solving and the ability to appreciate other people’s point of view.

5. Find the Mistake

Another activity that every student like is finding mistakes in what a teacher says. It is fun! You can deliberately make mistakes and allow students to collectively find those mistakes.

How?!

First of all, begin your class by announcing some deliberate mistakes during the whole class. But no student can point your mistake until he or she has noticed at least 5 mistakes.

Students can get help from each other to find 5 mistakes and allow one person to answer them.

Then, you can change “King John” with “King Henry”, give wrong years to historical incidence, change the name of a planet, or make other mistakes during the whole class.

This activity is a great revision exercise and also allows students to form their own alliances to come up with the required number of solutions.

Plus, the whole process is fun, as students get to find your mistakes.

6. A Divided Assignment

If doing the whole assignment seems like a burden for students, why don’t you offer a deal of cutting their burden?!

Know More: 10 Interesting Activities That Helps Kids TO Refresh their Mind

Offer an opportunity to divide an assignment into fractions and complete it as a group.

For this, you will have to divide your students into groups. Then, divide an assignment into fractions and assign those fractions to each member of a group. Do this with every group in the classroom.

Each group has to work collectively in order to provide a harmonized piece of work to justify the given assignment.

At the end of the given time period, every group gets to represent their work, and the most harmonized work gets extra marks or other rewards.

You can leverage this approach for computer programs, writing essays, creating a song, designing an ad campaign and other topics, depending on the subject you teach.

7. Healthy Critiquing among Students

Critiquing is a complicated activity to conduct. But you can make it healthy in nature by utilizing an approach where students criticize the work of other students along with a solution.

This activity is also conducted in groups. You divide your class into groups and each group has to work on a writing piece, a hypothesis, a philosophical question, a computer code or any other form of assignment you provide.

After the given period of time, each group presents their idea and thoughts. All the other groups can make notes including mentioning the mistakes in the presented idea and provide a solution at the same time.

This exercise will help college students understand the concept of healthy competition and problem-solving. They will also learn to enjoy figuring out mistakes and learn to appreciate innovative views of others.

8. Word Limit Answers

This is another collaborative game you can play with your students in college. This game is fun and matches the concept of limited characters people get when posting on social media.

In this game, you offer a limited number of words to every student. For example, you can say that every student can utter 20 words only.

Then, divide students into groups of 3 to 4. Now, you can ask questions and students have to answer.

Every group can discuss their answer among each other. And then they can divide the whole answer into 20-20 words among themselves. So, each member of a group answers one part of a question.

9. Classroom Charades

Divide your students into 2 groups. Now, members from each group come in front one-by-one. The opposite team tells a subject-related word or phrase.

Now, the student in the front has to act without saying anything, and his or her team members have to guess the right phrase or word.

This group activity is a popular one, so every student usually knows the rules. You just have to change the topics and make it about the subject you teach.

You can also make it more fun by mixing two topics together. For example, you can allow students to choose physics and/or movies, or pick literature with celebrities.

This will bring a fun twist to the game. Students feel confused if the word is from the subject or a celebrity or a movie.

It’s Your Turn Now!

Discipline and control matters, but only to a certain extent.

College students will feel more interested in studying if they enjoy each other’s company and also feel excited about your class.

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Fun group activities can help you attain both the goals. So, follow the given ideas!