Google Student Blog: Google Games comes to Japan

Student Blog

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The U.S. born Google Games made its way to Japan on November 24, 2012! Google Games is a fun-filled event designed to bring some of the Google culture to students and campus. This time, our first-ever Google Games took place in Kyoto and brought together 78 students from Kansai (the southern-central) region of Japan. Students were randomly allocated into groups of four to five to work on trivia questions, puzzle and coding questions, and a lego building competition. Groups were given points based on their performance and the top six groups were awarded Google swag. The day kicked off with trivia questions such as “What day of the week would it be in ten thousand years’ time from today?” Another question asked students to guess the number of post boxes in Japan that had either increased or decreased between 2006 and 2011. Surprisingly 15 out of 17 groups got it wrong, estimating that the figure had increased (it actually decreased by 6,891 post boxes!). It surely made Googlers wonder how many of these students have actually used a post box in the past few years...

Here is an example puzzle question

The competition heated up even more as students moved on to tackle the puzzle and coding questions. Each group had to come up with a single answer and get it checked and scored by Googlers every time they finished a question. The scoreboard in the room was constantly being updated throughout the game, adding extra buzz and nail-biting moments as students watched over the changing scores. The final game was Lego challenge. By this time, almost every student was up on their feet. A team of Googlers also entered the competition eagerly hoping to outcompete the students, but the Googlers were no match to the teams of competitive students.
The day was wrapped up with a mingling time for students to speak with Googlers. Many left happily saying that they got to learn some of the Google culture through the event. Some even said that they loved having the chance to use different parts of their brains.

We hope to be able to host another Google Games in Japan in the near future! If you are interested in finding out the answer to the above puzzle question, please see our Google+ posting here.

Posted by Yumi Oishi, People Programs Specialist, Google Games Japan Team