While feeding my little girl two weeks ago, I watched the Youth Specialties podcast with Jonathan McKee who gave an idea of a cell phone text messaging game. I took his idea and modified it a bit.

Rules
1. Split everyone up into teams of 3 to 5 students each. Make sure each team as at least one person with a picture messaging enabled cell phone.

2. Use a countdown timer to give teams exactly 2 minutes to run around the church and take a picture. The picture must include at least one person from their group. When they return, have teams message that picture to your email address.

3. Quickly take the pictures as they show up in your email Inbox and put them in a PowerPoint slide and assign each picture to a different team. Project it on the screen and let the teams race to be the first to take a picture that’s identical to the one assigned to them (in the same location) with one of their own team members.

4. The first team to send you a picture message replicating their assigned picture wins, but let the others keep playing for fun. Just set a time when the game is over and they all need to return to your youth room with or without a picture. If there are teams who can’t figure out where their assigned picture was taken, have the original team that took the picture announce the location at that time.

Here are the screenshots of when some of our sr. highers played it a couple weeks ago.

Original pictures labeled with their assigned teams

The teams who were able to successfully reproduce their assigned picture

Posted on October 13, 2009