Following on from 100 things kids should know, we had a bash at figuring out the basics of project management. Key ideas explored were:

1. Notion of resources
2. Notion of tasks
3. Connectivity of one task to another (output to an input) - sequential tasks
4. The evil of all projects - the critical path!
5. Parallel tasks

Usually I like to jump straight to digital for playing around, but it’s often better to start manually (i.e. paper and pen) to let the idea settle before getting distracted by tools. Trusty stickies on a whiteboard work well - everyone gets a turn to think of a task and stick it to the board. When all the tasks are up, we get to play around with positioning and finding the relationships, using markers to draw the connecting arrows. For the purposes of demonstration, we used the idea of planning a trip to Centerparcs.