Week 1 Game Ideas – On Campus

Amber Holt

1. Giant board game? – you get like a “game map” and you must travel to different locations, or buildings, like Wheatley, and answer trivia questions to collect an item. Every location has a unique item up for grabs and the first team of students to collect all of the items and return to “home base” wins. 
2. Sort of murder mystery like Clue – Inspired by a game a club that I was in hosted in high school, you travel to different areas across campus, collecting clues that give you details about who the “murderer” is, in this case a staff member” that eventually lead you to that person. For instance some of the clues could involve what building they work in, what major, what extracurricular activities they help out in, their hobbies, etc. When students reach the “murderer” they receive free RMU swag or other goodies
3. Scavenger duck (thanks to Sara) – students are encouraged to collect 1 duck of every color across campus. Students bring the ducks to a centralized hub where they get a punch card of sorts that marks that they collected that color of duck. Ducks are collected so that cheating is eliminated. For completing this, the participants could get a stuffed animal duck (to give incentive to play and not just keep the cute ducks). 
4. Battle of the departments – A canned food drive that is a competition between the different departments at RMU. The food would be donated to a local food bank (or taken to our very own one on campus) at the end of the competition. The winning department gets donuts or lunch. 
5. Game to conserve the most energy on campus – Chatham University did a game like this a few years back, promoting sustainability and energy conservation. It was a competition between floors in a dorm building to see who could conserve the most energy per floor. Because of the way the buildings were set up, they could go in and see per floor how much energy was being consumed. There was also some incentive like a prize for the floor to win. I also believe they had social media accounts or an online tracker set up so that the floors could see their progress and communicate with other floors. One issue with this was that some students, especially those who didn’t like their CA, would try to sabotage the results of other floors, constantly turning on lights. One benefit of this was that the school was able to recognize that students weren’t using their ovens (I believe) enough and they were removed from the dorms. This also helps eliminate unnecessary energy consumption and makes students realize the difference turning off and unplugging certain things can make.
   • For RMU to employ this, I think that it would need to be a competition between the different residence buildings and not particular floors. I think that would help to eliminate people sabotaging other floors in the same building. This would also have to have a time limit; for instance, 1 week (A good week would maybe be the week of Earth Day??). Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about how to measure energy consumption to say for certain how the results would be tracked, especially in RMU’s system. There would, however, need to be a really good prize to encourage students to actually participate.