A LEGO® Serious Play activity to help teamwork skills development amongst business students

ABSTRACT Methods for teaching higher education students how to learn teamwork skills are constantly evolving. Over the last few years, serious games have become popular in business schools for stimulating teamwork among students by making them focus on the game while pursuing a team objective. Among these games, LEGO® Serious Play has shown enormous potential. However, the number of results published on its application to the development of teamwork skills remains scarce. This paper seeks to explain the development of a teaching activity designed to make all first year undergraduate students in a business school work in teams. The way in which LEGO® Serious Play can position students within the research process is discussed, as is the potential for LEGO® Serious Play as a participatory method. Additionally, we summarize teacher and student metrics related to their experience with the activity in terms of teamwork performance and results, and we show the effect of contextual factors such as daily or weekly schedule or team size. This ‘one shot’ teamwork activity with first year students is expected to have an effect later when they are able to re-create the processes used to work as a team.