Explain that doing a Sudoku or playing Candy Crush are good examples of how we can experience flow – in many ways, they are a meaningless waste of time, yet we are engaged. Steven Kotler has identified four essential brain hacks to help you unlock your flow state: focus, challenge, clear goals and immediate feedback.

TIP: Students could complete the following activities in small groups or you could select a student volunteers.

1. Focus: Ask students to write a sentence with their non-preferred hand. Although this does not increase their flow, it shows that you can change an everyday activity that you do not usually need to think about to increase the challenge and focus.
2. Challenge: In groups of three, students need to move from Point A to Point B in the classroom with only three points of contact on the ground. Give students a time limit to increase the level of challenge.
3. Clear goals: Bounce a Ping-Pong ball into a cup. The goal in this activity is very clear – the student either achieves the goal or they do not.
4. Immediate feedback: Play ‘Code Breaker’. Think of an undisclosed 4-digit ‘code’ and write it down. A student tries to guess the number (this is best done by writing it on a whiteboard for everyone to see) and the teacher provides them with immediate feedback in the following way:
   → For a correct number in the correct position, give a tick
   → For a correct number in the wrong position, give a circle
   → For a number that does not appear in the teacher’s code, give a cross (e.g. Teacher’s number: 3057, Student’s guess: 3178, Teacher’s response: tick, cross, circle, ). Continue this process until the correct code is guessed.

Success criteria: Participation in demonstrations, offer thoughtful contributions