Team Craft Team Building

Raft Craft

Raft Building and Racing Program

Invention, moxie, strategy and luck; add teamwork, a beach on a refreshing lake, bay, or pool, lots of unusual flotation materials and Team Craft's experiential learning approach. Combine it all together and you've got the winning ingredients for fun and memorable team building on a hot day.

This two-part program involves building and then racing rafts in small teams. It can last from 2 to 3 hours or longer with large group ice breakers at the beginning. The design can be adapted to meet your team building objectives to focus on creativity, competition, and multiple elements of teamwork. The result: lots of good clean fun and a great team building experience.

Raft Building: Building materials are limited to items that can be obtained from the “raft store”. Participants are shown the store at the outset of the activity. A few minutes into the activity, materials can be "purchased" using the team's point budget.

Ample materials are made available to construct a seaworthy raft. Materials consist of a wide array of items that float, from inner tubes to plastic foam to noodles. Framing and connecting materials are also available such as rope, and plastic tubing, and, of course, paddles.

Once built, the rafts are brought to the shoreline for basic seaworthiness inspection and for the teams to flaunt their designs and introduce their two member paddle teams.

Raft Racing: The scope of the race depends on the size of the group: a single race for a small group or race series for a larger group.

Awards Ceremony: Team Craft provides a gold medal on a satin ribbon to first place team members.

Work Applications: Debrief discussions follow the activity. Facilitators inquire about effective strategy within each team, effective problem solving strategies, distribution of roles, effective communication, overall key insights and how these provide opportunities to improve teamwork in the future.

Participants leave with a fun experience, new bonds with teammates, as well as positive new insight on team effectiveness. Swimming and a picnic can be included in the activity.

Raft Craft Program Outline

Download the Raft Craft Team Building Program Overview "PDF" Acrobat file for printing this information and sharing with others offline.