Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

Trading Cards

An icebreaker activity for training or other team-based settings

If you are familiar with Gamestorm, you may have tried or at least read about the Trading Cards game. If not, read on!

As the sub-title implies, I have used this activity in two different ways:-

• In a formal (classroom) training setting, where I have asked students to use this technique to get to know each other at the beginning of the training session
• With a distributed team, where each team member was asked to create a trading card that was stored in a single document which could be shared in an online location accessible to all

A wall of baseball trading cards

Here is a brief summary of how this works:

Materials:

• In-person (classroom) setting. Notecards (preferably 4 x 6) and sharpies/pens
• Virtual (distributed) setting. A text editor and a means of sharing the finished product (e.g., wiki, SharePoint)

Steps:

1. Timebox the activity (anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes), where each person will have a set amount of time to create a trading card about themselves, and a set amount of time to swap trading cards with others.
2. Typically each trading card consists of a few basic elements like a simple drawing, a nickname, and a “fun fact” or similar piece of information that others in the group are not likely to know. To more formally apply a baseball (or other sport) trading card metaphor, other elements that can be included on the card: “acquired from” (e.g., previous employer), birth city, name of college attended, etc.
3. There are many ways to swap cards. In a classroom setting, you can have the students pass the cards around in a specific order, or you can let them self-organize. Other variables include how many card passes you choose to have participants do, and how you frame any questions for students to ask of one another. For a particular distributed team I worked with, I asked each member of the team to send me the information they wanted to include on their card (including a digital picture), and I created a single document containing all of their separate “cards,” which we then shared and discussed.