The Arena: An Activity to Foster Teamwork, Communication, and Cooperation in and Across Teams

The Arena activity is an in-class, experiential learning exercise that requires student teams to navigate and assist a blindfolded team member through a maze-like setting. The goal of the activity is to seek and find all of the team’s assigned objects. However, only the blindfolded team member can collect these objects in The Arena. This activity is applicable to courses focusing on the development of soft skills such as teamwork, cooperation (versus competition) across teams, communication, and leadership/followership. This article provides a description of the activity, options for variations of The Arena, suggestions for debriefing the activity, specific debriefing questions, and sample student answers to the debriefing questions.