Playing Human Knot Explain to the players that they are not to let go of each other’s hands while they remain in the circle and untangle themselves. (Perhaps that’s a subject for another post.) Unless I’ve made a mistake (or mistakes), there will be a giant connected component, in this case a cycle, and almost certainly some clusters of size O(log n). A human knot is a team building activity  or an icebreaker game for new people to learn how to work together in physical proximity. Privacy Statement - If you have a larger youth group, split them into several smaller groups to play) Everyone puts their hands into the center; Instruct them to grab 1 other person’s hand with one hand and then grab another person’s hand with the other. Group Awareness. Game/workshop which helps to build the team by bonding them with the exercises. Human Knot Team Building Exercise Starting in a circle, participants connect hands with two others people in the group to form the human knot. Have your group stand in a circle (n.b. Please explain. And of course, if there is a cutie in the circle, everyone will try Cookie Policy, Question added by Sashikanta Mohapatra , Manager - Business Development/Sales Process Deployment , Vodafone Spacetel Limited, Answer added by Mohammed Ashraf , Director of International Business , Saqr Al-Khayala Group, Answer added by sameer abdul wahab alfaddagh, عضو هيئة تدريس , جامعة دلمون, Answer added by Vinod Jetley, Assistant General Manager , State Bank of India, Answer added by Khalid Ghaffar, Consultant for Business Development , Waters Corporation USA, Answer added by Gayasuddin Mohammed, Advocate , Practicing Law before High Court at Hyderabad, Answer added by TARIG BABIKER AL AMIN, Planning & Researcher , Assistance inspector , الشركة السودانية للمناطق والأسواق الحرة المحدودة, Answer added by Ahmed Mohamed Ayesh Sarkhi, HR,Payroll, Admin & Procurement General Manager , Alkasabi Travel & Tours, is a common icebreaker game or team building activity for new people to learn to work together in physical proximity. People play this game all the time, and yet most of the descriptions of the game grossly misunderstand the possible outcomes. Everyone puts their right hand into the circle and takes the hand of someone across from them. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Learning Outcomes: This game helps to build cooperation between the players as they learn that cooperating is the only way they can get out of the knot. Are they able to communicate with each other without resorting to commands? Then they should extend their left hand in and take the left hand of someone across the circle from them (it should not be the person standing next to them). The human knot is a team building activity where team members stand in a circle and grab hold of the hands of other participants that are not immediately next to them. Wow, this makes me feel so much better for the few times that I was in a group that was unable to untie! Depending on how many people you have this can take a long time or can be What is human resource and human capital? to go for his/her hand. or log in An easy way to ensure that the game will end up with a single circle with no nodes is to start from a circle of people holding each other hand, looking all towards the center of the circle, and ask some of them to cross his/her arms and swap his left hand with his right hand grasping again the same neighbors. I actually took two classes with Colin Adams (one on knot theory and one on hyperbolic 3-manifolds) which is definitely where I’m coming from in thinking about this. No materials are required. Then you could use the Erdős–Rényi random graph model to see what happens when the number of participants gets large.

=) My first exposure to the fact that the human knot might not be what I had always thought was actually when I attended a calculus course taught by Adams when visiting Williams — at the beginning of the class he had two groups of volunteers come up and arrange themselves identically in human knots according to a diagram he had drawn on the board — but then he strategically moved just one grip in one of the groups.