Help me design an activity

The Sandbox General
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I need to fill 30 minutes of time tomorrow for an intern activity.

I’ve decided to play “Spreadsheet Wars” - where I’ll split the group into 2-3 teams depending on numbers (4-5 people per team) and give them 20 minutes to design something in a spreadsheet collaboratively.

I just need a theme, which is where I need help. I don’t want it to be actuarial - there are different skill sets being represented here. I do want it to be fun.

Some ideas I’ve seen on the internet are “design a tool that someone would pay $5 for” and “design a recipe generator.” But I’m trying to think of other ideas to weigh and my creativity is failing me. And this is tomorrow.

Any ideas on something that would be fun AND not actuarial AND have potential to be challenging (if desired) AND only take 20 minutes? I want to leave the last 10 minutes to have the groups show off their creations.

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There have been a lot of fun games in the AO/GoA that have needed spreadsheets to moderate/play. You could provide the rules to something like time wars and have them put something together.

@Mountainhawk and @Vorian_Atreides tend to be pretty good at this.

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Never Have I Ever game.

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Do you think there would be some pressure to come up with something “good” there? I worry that those with lesser Excel skills will feel left out.

I was considering doing something like…design the most complicated calculation for something completely useless. Or create the worst horoscope generator. I dunno. I’m not good at these things.

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Oh oh, or like a Mad Libs.

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I think this is a really good idea.

…especially if you combine it with the one they did on “The Office”

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That sounds like a lot of effort. Just plop down the company’s annual statement and say “read this” imo.

Unless you have real work to give them of course.

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Generate a card “game” set up . . . let’s do Hearts/Spades.

One worksheet that has the deck–design mechanism to shuffle the deck.

One worksheet for each “player”–deal all of the cards (after they’ve been shuffled).

  1. Start with 4 players (so each player gets 13 cards)
  2. Expand to 5 or 7 players–so there’ll be “left over” cards that aren’t dealt.
  3. Modify to play Euchre: Deck consists of {A, K, Q, J, 10, 9 } cards only and only 5 cards per player is dealt (4 player game).

Folks vote for best design based on scalability of design for other games (e.g., various forms of poker with varying number of players and use of multiple decks for the deal).

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