Creativity Exercise: Caption the Cartoon

Games, Exercises, Problem Solving, Marketing, Design, Creative Writing

:::: 78 Ratings :::: Monday, July 4, 2011

Purpose

This fun activity helps delegates to exercise their creativity and use their whole brains (left and right side) to solve the problems presented here. You can also run this exercise as a competition between groups and provide a prize at the end.

Objective

Create new captions for cartoons in popular newspapers or magazines.

What You Need

A set of cartoons from popular magazines or newspapers. You need several sets so you can provide them to all groups of 2 or 3 delegates. Remove the captions from these cartoons. For best results, stick a white label on the captions and take copies of them so delegates can use that space to create their captions. Include a minimum of 3 different cartoons. You can use more if you have more time.
The original cartoons.

Setup

Divide the delegates to groups of 2 or 3.
Distribute a similar set of cartoons to all groups.
Ask groups to come up with new captions for these cartoons.
Allocate 10 minutes for this part.
Bring back everyone together and ask each group to share their captions.
Expect a lot of laugh.
Optional: Ask groups to vote for the best caption (other than their own), state why they think so and provide a prize to the winning group.
Expect groups to get inspired by each other. Ask all groups to work together and come up with new captions while getting inspired by captions suggested by all groups so far.
At the end, show the original cartoons and see what delegates think of their own captions.
Follow with a discussion.

Timing

Explaining the Exercise: 2 minutes

Activity: 10 minutes

Group Feedback: 5 minutes

Discussion

Did you end up with better and more creative captions the more you listened to other people’s ideas? Did you end up with a great caption at the end when you combined all ideas and brainstormed a new caption with a high team synergy? What does this suggest for coming up with creative ideas at work? Where you captions better or worse than the originals? What did you learn from this exercise?