BWOX

Experiential exercises that are being tested and run in classrooms today.

A repository created by of classroom exercises with the facilitator guide, the student materials, the timing, and the debrief. Not an abstract, not a conference paper describing one. The thing itself, ready to teach on Tuesday.

Why this exists

The good exercises are locked in people's drawers.

Experiential teaching material moves by word of mouth. Someone runs a session at a conference, forty people watch it work, and then it goes home in a laptop bag. If you want to run it yourself you email the author and hope they still have the handouts. Most of the time what comes back is a description of the exercise rather than the exercise.

The published route is worse. A journal will take the paper about the activity, which is not the same artifact as the activity. You end up reconstructing timing, materials, and debrief questions from a methods section. BWOX exists to hold the artifact instead of the write-up, with enough operational detail that someone who was not in the room can run it cold.

The catalogue

Search it the way you actually plan a class.

By what you are teaching, how long you have, and whether the room is physical. Every listing below has been built and run in a real classroom.

Topic
Format
What a listing contains

Enough to run it without asking anyone.

01

The facilitator guide

Minute by minute timing, what to say to open, the failure modes, and what to do when a group finishes early or stalls. Written by whoever ran it, after they ran it.

02

The student materials

Role cards, handouts, slide decks, and where an exercise is software, the working application. Downloadable, editable, and licensed for classroom use.

03

The debrief

The part that gets skipped. Discussion questions, the concepts each one is meant to surface, and the named literature the exercise is grounded in, so you can defend it to a curriculum committee.

Roadmap

The path begins with Management. The trip may take us anywhere.

The catalogue opens in management and organizational behavior, simply because that is what is ready today. The structure is not specific to that field, and the disciplines below are genuinely next in line rather than aspirational.

Management Organizational behavior, leadership, strategy, and teaching methods. Open
Negotiation Bargaining simulations, integrative and distributive cases, multi party exercises. Next
Conflict and mediation Dispute resolution role plays, mediation practice tools, and process design exercises. Next
Economics Market and auction games, public goods and commons problems, behavioral experiments. Planned
Contribute

Two ways in.

The catalogue grows from exercises people already run. Some arrive finished. Others arrive as a stack of role cards that only works when their author is standing in the room, and those are the ones worth rescuing.

Path one

Publish what you already run

You have the exercise, the materials, and the scars from running it. It gets a listing with your name on it, a permanent link, and a place where people searching by concept or by literature will actually find it.

  • You keep authorship and every right to go on using it however you like
  • Listings carry full author credit and a contact address
  • Nothing is published without your sign off on the final listing
Send an exercise to publish
Path two

Have it built for you

Your exercise lives on paper, or only works in one room, or falls apart the moment the class is remote. Send it and it gets built into a working browser version. No code, no hosting, no software to learn.

  • Role assignment, timers, live shared state, and results delivered to the facilitator
  • A facilitator key written from how you actually run it
  • Runs in a room, online, or split across both
  • Authorship stays yours. Scope and terms are agreed before any work starts
Ask about having one built

This is the same build process behind every exercise in the catalogue.

What to send

Either path starts the same way. A description of the exercise, whatever materials exist even if they are handwritten, roughly how long it takes, how many people it needs, and what you want students to walk out understanding. Rough is fine. It is easier to work from the real thing than from a tidied up version of it.

Start with an email.

Tell me what the exercise is and how you run it now. That is enough to begin either path, and it costs nothing to ask.