Simple, easy to facilitate drills to warm students up.
These simple exercises are doable in a short time and require very little preparation or facilitation. Use them to introduce students to entrepreneurial thinking, or simply as a warm-up early into the lecture.
Alternative uses for a paper clip
Provide student groups with a paper clip and give them one minute to list alternative uses for it. The exercise is a good warm-up for ideation, and the follow-up discussion helps them to understand that they could have thought even more outside the box.
Draw an alien
Ask students to draw an alien in 5 minutes. This exercise is about structured imagination: most students will draw something that resembles existing beings. Students will learn that people are restricted by existing things, and that imagining something nonexistent is difficult.
30 circles challenge
Ask students to fill as many empty circles as they can with recognizable objects in 3 minutes. The catch: the circle must be a part of the drawing. Students will realize there were many hidden assumptions, and that the circles can be used a lot more creatively than they thought.
