Teaching has never had more competition for attention. Students arrive already fluent in content that is faster, louder and better funded than anything a timetable can offer, and they are very quick to decide whether something is worth their engagement.
You cannot out-produce YouTube. What you can do is take fun seriously, which is a different thing entirely, and use it as the vehicle rather than the reward.
At Great Race we describe ourselves as the Masters of Fun. We use fun to deliver learning objectives and to build social engagement, and we have been doing it since 2009.
What Makes an Incursion Genuinely Fun
Plenty of incursions are billed as fun and land as an assembly with props. The ones that work tend to share a few things.
- Students do, rather than watch. The moment the group becomes an audience, you have lost the back three rows. Every minute a student is active is a minute they are not deciding whether to disengage.
- The format needs no explanation. If a host has to spend ten minutes setting up the rules, the energy is gone before it starts. Formats students already know from television start at full speed.
- Teams are assigned, not chosen. Letting students pick their own groups reproduces the social map they came in with. Assigning teams is what creates the new conversations.
- The host can actually hold a room. This is the variable that matters most and the one schools have least control over when booking. Our events are hosted by professional actors, not facilitators. A trained performer manages energy, reads the group, and gets the students who had decided not to participate participating anyway.
Turning the Curriculum Into the Game
The best version of this is when the learning objective is the game rather than a lesson bolted onto it.
Trinity Catholic College in Sydney came to us with the Year 7 and 8 maths curriculum and a question about whether it could be run as a city-wide Amazing Race. It could. Four hundred students and fifty teachers split into forty teams and spent the day working through maths-based challenges across the city in a competition for mathematical glory.
It worked as an excursion and it worked against the learning objectives. It is now an annual event, and the programme became a case study in the Catholic Schools journal.
We have also built incursion games that teach students in low socio-economic areas how to access healthy choices and nurture positive behaviours, and we regularly bring our Survivor format into schools with either specific learning outcomes or a straightforward focus on confidence and teamwork.
If you can name the outcome, there is usually a way to make it the game.
Incursion or Excursion?
Both work. They solve different problems.
An incursion wins on logistics and cost. Nothing to transport, no travel time eating the session, no risk assessment for a public site, and a full year level can move through it inside the normal timetable.
An excursion wins when the location does real work, as it did for Trinity, where the city itself was the maths problem.
For team building, wellbeing and transition events, the activity is almost always the point rather than the place, which is why most schools book the incursion.
Formats That Work in Schools
Survivor Schools turns a year level into competing tribes working through physical and mental immunity challenges. Scales large, runs indoors or out.
Schools Amazing Race sends teams after cryptic clues and checkpoint challenges, through the city as an excursion or across the grounds as an incursion.
Game Show seats teams at tables and runs them through rounds drawn from Wheel of Fortune, Sale of the Century, The Price is Right and a music and movie sound round. The option when everyone needs to be in one hall and out on the bell.
Minute to Win It turns everyday objects into challenges that are much harder than they look. The most reliable way to get participation out of a mixed group.
Take Fun Seriously
Students do not just enjoy this sort of event. In an environment competing this hard for their attention, they need it to learn.
Be the hero at your school. Tell us the year level, your numbers, and what you want the day to achieve, and we will tell you what fits.
Get in touch with Great Race or call 1300 504 152.
