Introduction

The idea of the game is to find out which well-known person or fictive character one has been assigned. This could be an actor, a singer, an athlete, or a character from a cartoon or movie. While the players know about the other characters, they do not know their own one, since it is written on a piece of paper and attached to their forehead or back. The only way to figure out one's character is to ask “yes” or “no" questions (e.g: "Do I have superpowers?").  Usually the game works in turns. If you get a "yes", you are allowed to continue asking questions and if you get a "no", it is the next player's turn. The one who finds out their character first wins the round.

Target group and Time

Children should not be younger than ten to play the game. There is no maximum age.

Although the game could be played in pairs, smaller or medium sized groups promise more fun. The larger the group, the longer one round takes. Considering grade-five school children the group should not be larger than 5-6 participants, otherwise they might loose interest easily while waiting for their turn. A time frame of 10 minutes seems not enough to properly get it going. About 20 minutes should work much better to explain the rules and still give everyone enough time to play. 

Learning objectives

The main goals here are to strengthen the ability to form questions in English and to creatively apply the right vocabulary to get closer the target. Moreover, the kids have to listen to and understand their co-player's questions and then decide whether to answer them with a "yes" or with a "no". They can also use the other's questions to get ideas for their own questions to follow.

On a more advanced level it might even be possible to "read between the lines" when the others are not immediately sure whether to answer your question with "yes" or "no". In such a case they sometimes even might disagree among each other and give hints to the player asking the question.

Instructions to set up the activity

Material needed: small pieces of paper, pens

The names of the characters have to be written on small pieces of paper, either by the instructor, or by the participants themselves. The latter option is preferable. For the sake of the game it is imperative that nobody sees which name is being attached to their forehead or back.

Letting it run

The biggest challenge and highest risk for the game to not work out is the gigantic pool from which famous persons and characters can be picked. How can the players be sure that the others know about this very character they chose for a co-player? An example: A boy picks a soccer player, probably his idol, for a girl in his group and she never had heard the name before (this happened when I was trying the game in the Lehr-Lern-Labor). To avoid this maybe a topic could be preconditioned by the instructor. One could for example say that only characters form a certain story/novel which has been the subject of the last couple of lessons are allowed to be chosen.

Especially with kids on the primary levels this game might turn out to be complicated if there is only ten minutes time. More context might be needed for everyone of them to be on the same page about which characters to pick and how to play the game in its details. I suggest to incorporate this game into a wider context (movie, novel, stories) which limits the range of characters and provides a certain set of vocabulary as well.