Puerto Rico Engagements: Icebreaker Activities

Icebreaker Examples

Cruise Ship

• The facilitators asked all participants, including the court personnel at the engagement sessions, to imagine they were boarding a cruise ship to the Caribbean. They were then asked to envision that, during this cruise, the ship encounters a storm. Their job was to compose a small group that met certain criteria so they could board an imaginary lifeboat.
• According to the rules of the exercise, to survive the storm, each lifeboat needed to be occupied by mixed gender groups, with at least one male and one female in each group. In addition, each boat member needed to have a different birthday month. In order to create these groups, the participants had no choice but to interact quite extensively with others.
• Once they had formed a group meeting the criteria, they were asked to share each member´s name, hobby, and most frequent daily activity. They were also asked to decide on a name for their boat.
• Participants successfully formed small groups, shared information, decided on a boat name, and everyone then convened in a plenary session. Each “lifeboat team” shared a summary of their conversations with the larger group. They also discussed any struggles and decision-making which took place to achieve their goal of survival (i.e., forming their small group according to the criteria), and what they had learned from the exercise.

Musical Squares

• The facilitators created four large squares on the dark colored floor using white masking tape. The size of the squares depended on the size of the group. The four squares together were large enough that about one-quarter of those participating in the exercise could fit easily and comfortably within each of the four squares.
• The facilitators explained the task to the participants. When the music played in the background (at medium volume), participants and court personnel moved about the room freely. When the music stopped, everyone found a place to stand within one of the taped squares.
• With each iteration of this exercise, the Puerto Rico team removed one square. When the music stopped, individuals had to then work together to try to find a way to fit everyone into the remaining squares so that no one was stepping over or outside of the square boundaries.
• The game ended when it was no longer possible to fit all participants into the remaining squares (usually with two squares or one square remaining). At the conclusion of the exercise, the participants discussed how they had helped one another. A large focus of the discussion was on the importance of not discriminating against anyone. If anyone was left out of the squares, not only one or two people would lose the game, all would lose.

Line-of-Height

• Using masking tape, the engagement organizers marked two parallel lines on the floor to create a long thin rectangle where all participants could fit in a single file line. The rectangle was about 20 centimeters wide.
• The facilitator invited the group to enter the rectangular box in random order. Once everyone was positioned inside the box, the facilitator explained the objective was to position themselves according to height, without stepping outside the masking tape lines.
• After the group managed to work together to arrange themselves by height, the facilitator led a discussion about how they managed to work together. They discussed how they helped each other move without falling, how the group's support felt, and so on.