Looking for activies similar to the Last Ten People on Earth

I've been searching lateral thinking stuff and getting lots of the two minute mystery type things and logic puzzles which are good.  But I'd really like to do more of the ones like Last Ten People on Earth and Desert Island, since the students seem to enjoy them.  Does anyone have any good links to more of these?  xie xie ni

You might like to base activities around  "If The World Were a Village" websites, a few of which are:
http://www.familycare.org/news/if_the_world.htm
http://www.acblack.com/globalvillage/
http://www.gdrc.org/uem/1000-village.html
to give some Global Education, which Chinese children desperately lack, then base your ten [or however many] "survivors" on the representations found within The Village.This would require them to question some long-held beliefs about who/what is important!

I had a great one before. It was fairly advanced though. Nothing you do with young ones but with uni age or older it would work. It was called "Who gets the heart?". You get a list of patients all waiting for a heart transplant. The students imagine they are ones who decide. I don't have it anymore but if you are interested, I could look for it.

Another one I do is to put the students in groups of ten or so. Assign each student a job. I use mother, soldier, businessman, lawyer, cook, teacher, farmer, beggar, nurse and singer. I tell them they are in a boat which is slowly sinking. They have to throw 2 people overboard to survive. Each person must make their plea why they should be kept on the boat and then everyone votes. I always enjoy that one.

They have a lesson plan on www.bogglesworld.com It's in the section, ESL for adults. It's called the Great Dinner Party. Students are given a list full of names of famous people and they have to decide who they would invite and what food they would serve.

Babala;

Thanks for the input; I have done the dinner party with a few of my classes.  I like the sinking boat one and the heart transplant definitely sounds interesting.   

Not working for me...

I run the 'Bunker" one once a semester - 6 people in a bunker, food and air for 5, who gets thrown out.  Why repeat it?  Because the students can see their own progress in being able to argue more effectively.

But the dinner party one sounds fun.  Which people do you list?  Do you include famous Chinese people - Li Bai, Lei Feng etc?  Or do you give them the list of names, send them off to research them first and then choose?  Do you get brave and toss in the DL?  (He always ends up on the dinner party list when you do this with friends at home).

I used the one that the website provided. Some of the names were Harry Potter, Hitler, Hideyoshi, Ghandi, Cinderella.... I had a Chinese friend translate some of the names beforehand so the students would know who they were.

We used those and I added some as they worked on the exercise...Julia Roberts (they love her) Michael Jordan, Martin Luther King Jr.

Some students added their own.

I had them suggest a menu and entertainment.  Harry Potter provided magic tricks, Beethoven music...

I did a lesson on lateral thinking earlier this spring.

First, I gave a quick little Wikified definition of lateral thinking. I then gave them this problem to solve: A man lives on the 18th floor. Every day, he goes out for a walk. When he comes home, he takes the elevator up to the 13th floor, then walks up to the 18th... unless it's raining or there's another person with him, then he rides the elevator to the 18th. Why?

I also had them try to figure out how to make a car work with square wheels and then try to apply the square wheels car solutions to a real car.



For the Last 10 People equivalent, I tell them that they're going to be stranded on a desert island for an unknown period of time (anywhere from one day to a lifetime) and they can take 5 items each (but place limits, they must specify the amount of food if they're going to take food... ridiculous amounts count as multiple items). They must debate over which items are most needed for the group to survive. Oddly, one group decided to take a rice cooker.

Hope that helps... I'll share more details if you want once I get my former coworker to email me all of my old lesson plans.