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Description

Can your team collect enough clean confetti from the confetti river, without polluting your cup?

Courtesy of The Scout Association
https://www.scouts.org.uk/activities/clean-confetti/

Resources

Multi-coloured confetti (including some blue pieces)
Paper cups (two for each team)

See the information video at scouts.org.uk/activities/clean-confetti/

Take it further
You could use this activity to introduce the Community Impact Staged Activity Badge, and some of the different issues or themes you might want to focus your impact project on.

Safety: Active games
The game area should be free of hazards. Explain the rules of the game clearly and have a clear way to communicate that the game must stop when needed.


Water facts
- 844 million people don’t have clean water close to home.
- 3 billion people don’t have a decent toilet of their own.
- 31% of schools don’t have clean water.
- A newborn baby dies from an infection caused by lack of safe water and an unclean environment every minute.
- Diarrhoea caused by dirty water and poor toilets kills a child under five every two minutes.
- Around the world up to 443 million school days are lost every year because of water-related illnesses.
- The average distance that women in Africa and Asia walk to collect water is six kilometres.
- In Sub-Saharan African, women and girls spend 40 billion hours a year collecting water. This is the same amount of time as a year’s worth of work by the entire workforce of France.
- Many girls’ school attendance is impacted by them having to spend their mornings walking long distances to collect water.
- Children will typically carry containers of water on their heads – these weigh up to four and a half kilograms. The containers teenagers carry can weigh up to twenty kilograms.

Sources: 1: World Health Organisation and UNICEF, 2017. 2: World Health Organisation and UNICEF, 2017. 3: World Health Organisation and UNICEF, 2018. 4: World Health Organisation, 2015. 5: WASHWATCH.org. 6: Human Development Report, 2006. 7: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2010. 8: UN Women, 2014. 9: The World Bank, 2013. 10: Milken Institute School of Public Health, 2016.

Instructions

Before you begin
- Create a river of multi-coloured confetti at one end of your meeting place. Pour the confetti straight onto the floor in a long, curved, shape. If you want to avoid mess, you could fill a bucket, bowl, or tray with the confetti to make a lake or pond instead.


Talk about water
1. Everyone should talk about the ways they use water on a daily basis. How do you use it when you’re getting ready in the morning? What about at school or work? What about at dinner time?

2. The person leading the game should explain that millions of people live without access to clean water. In some places, children have to collect water for their families; this can mean walking long distances up to four times a day, and that children can’t go to school. It’s up to you how you do this – you could talk to everyone about the ‘Water facts’ below, or play a video like WaterAid’s Grace’s story (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF_HlgnWEwU).

3. Everyone should talk about what may make water unclean. Lots of different things can pollute water, for example, oil, sewage, pesticides, plastic, rubbish, or chemicals from factories.


Get ready to play
1. Split into small teams that are roughly the same size. Give each team two cups.

2. Each team should line up on the other side of the room to the river, facing the river.

3. The river is full of water (the blue pieces of confetti), but it’s unclean. The other colours of confetti represent all of the pollutants people talked about earlier. If you can’t get blue confetti, you can change these colours. You just need one colour to act as clean water, and one to act as pollutants.

4. The person at the front of each line should put one of the cups on the floor. This is their team’s home cup, which will hold all the water they collect.


Collect the confetti
1. The first person in each line should take the other cup (the collection cup), and run to the river.

2. When they reach the river, they should collect as many blue pieces of confetti as they can, putting them in their collection cup. They shouldn’t pick up any other colours of confetti. Once a piece of confetti is in the collection cup it can’t be taken out again. Any blue confetti that’s dropped on the floor is no longer clean, so players shouldn’t pick it up or add it to their cup.

3. The person leading the game should time ten seconds. Once ten seconds is up, the player should run back to their team and transfer everything from the collection cup to the home cup. Once a piece of confetti is in the home cup, it can’t be taken out again. The timing doesn’t need to be exact. You don’t need to use a stopwatch unless you want to; you could just count slowly to ten.

4. Everyone should repeat steps one to three, until everyone in the smallest team has had a turn. If your teams don’t have the same number of people, people in the bigger teams should go again while people in the smallest team have their turn.

5. Once everyone’s had a turn, everyone should get back into a big circle.

6. Everyone should count the pieces of confetti in their home cup. Blue pieces are worth one point. Teams lose one point for each piece of other coloured confetti, because these are the pollutants that make the water unclean.

7. The winning team is the one with the most points, after their clean water’s been counted and any points have been taken off for any pollutants.

8. Now it’s time to reflect on what it means to be a citizen in a world where not everyone has access to clean water, and what it means to respect people who have different backgrounds to us. We’ve included some questions below to get you started.



Change the level of challenge
The players could make their own confetti from scrap paper, before making their own river.
Change the length of time people have to collect confetti, or change the size of teams, to vary the challenge.
Change the point value of the clean water or the confetti to suit your players. Do pollutants need to cause more or less damage than one point?

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Badge Links

• World - Environment