The Newspaper Tower Challenge is a game I remember playing – and loving – when I was younger. It’s perfect when you want a team building game that involves all the young people in your youth group.
The way the newspaper business is going though, you may not have many more years to play this game!
Resources
- Newspapers. Many, many newspapers
- Sticky tape – one large roll per team
- Scissors – one pair per team
- Measuring tape
Time
You can expect the Newspaper Tower activity to take about 30 minutes in total. Allow approx. 5 minutes for explaining the activity, 20 minutes for them to work out their newspaper tower design and to build it, then 5 minutes at the end to measure all the different towers.
Set Up
Split the young people up into teams and give each team the same amount of newspapers and one large roll of sticky tape.
If you have the space, spread the teams out in different rooms so that they can’t copy each others’ design.
To Play
The challenge is for the young people to work out how to build a newspaper tower that’s the tallest. They can only build the tower using the newspapers, tape and scissors – no other resources are allowed.
The newspaper towers have to be free-standing – team members can’t support it or have it resting against a wall.
Set a time limit on how long they have to build the tower, including enough time for them to discuss a strategy before they start building.
Winner
The winning team is the one with the tallest tower. On the off-chance that you have two teams with towers that are the exact same height, there are a couple of tiebreaker options you can use:
1) Design – award the win to the team that you judge to have the best design. This can either be:
- The most aesthetically pleasing newspaper tower design, or
- The one that has the most creative design
2) Stability – award the win to the team that has the most stable structure. There are a couple of ways of doing this too:
- Make the teams carry their tower into another room and place it on the floor without being allowed to reconstruct it if it comes apart. The team which then has the tallest tower wins
- Set up a desk fan to blow against each tower, starting with the lowest speed. The winning team is the one whose tower can withstand a stronger wind than the other
If you like this idea, check out our other youth work games.
Question: Do you play the Newspaper Tower Challenge in a different way to this? If so, let us know what you do differently in the comments below.
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Image courtesy of binarydreams, Flickr