Day 1: Capture the Flag

The day after camp started, everything was running smooth. We were ahead of schedule, because things were much quicker than planned, but we corrected it and moved things around to create a perfect schedule. The Czech students love to play volleyball, and I love to too, so we played for hours during the breaks in the warm sun. The first project was challenging, it was about Marketing Strategy of a university (from the perspective of a student). I was amazed by the ideas they came up with. For guerilla marketing, the yellow team came up with putting a “Bathtub of Money” in a public place, with the bills being pamphlets of information about the university. The red team thought of great posters and logos for an international university. The blue team came up with a marketing strategy for a university and told the university what matters to them may be different than what they may have thought. The green team though of a media plan that focused the university’s marketing online and in catchy places. I was really impressed.
At night, it was time for “Capture the Flag”. This was me and Ekta’s night activity, so we had each team paint a flag with their team colors. We divided the camp into five parts, and gave each team a zone to protect. The faci’s played too, and we had our own flag to hide too. There was a “jail” where if you got caught by another team, you were forced to wait in jail until someone from your team bailed you out. The game started out perfectly, but we quickly realized that the zones were too big and it was nearly impossible to steal people’s flags. Not to mention the green team hid their flag in a field of “kopšiva” or the Czech equivalent of poison ivy or something. Needless to say, after an hour and half of battle, the students were tired, but not broken down. The red team managed to capture two flags, the green and the blue team, but not without a price. Poor John had to slather his arms in ointment because of the kopšiva fields he went through to get the green flag. Everyone had a blast and some were frustrated with the difficulty in getting the flags. The faci team didn’t capture a flag, but were so close to the blue team and red team it was not even funny. We literally walked by both team’s flags and didn’t notice they were there, although both were clearly visible, but greatly disguised.  Day 1 was a good day.