Find Someone Who — running the classic mingle without the usual chaos
Sixty-four prompts, a grid, and one target: eight different classmates' names. A card says "...has a pet cat" and the student has to turn that into a real question before anyone can answer it. Get a yes, type the name in, move on. The app refuses to accept the same name twice, which quietly solves the problem every teacher knows — two friends filling each other's grids and sitting back down.
The grammar is in the conversion, not the answer
The cards are written as third-person statements and the task is to speak them as second-person questions. "...hates waking up early" becomes "Do you hate waking up early?". That transformation is the lesson: auxiliary selection, word order, and subject-verb agreement, performed sixty-four different ways in a quarter of an hour. Written on a worksheet it is a drill nobody enjoys. Standing up with a real person waiting for the question, it is simply how you get what you want.
One name, one cell — and the app enforces it
The single-entry rule is the difference between a mingle and a huddle. Because the restriction lives in the code rather than in your instructions, you do not have to police it, and students stop trying after the second refusal. The practical effect is that reaching eight names requires speaking to eight different people, which is exactly the outcome the activity exists for.
Insist on a full sentence before the name goes in
This is the rule worth adding yourself. A grunted "yes" earns nothing; the name only gets written after a complete answer — "Yes, I have two cats, they are called…". Without it the room fills with monosyllables and the activity becomes a signature hunt. With it, every one of those eight exchanges produces real sentences, and a fifteen-minute mingle generates more individual speaking turns than a whole week of teacher-fronted lessons.
Change the prompts, change the tense
The format survives any grammar point you attach to it, which is why it outlives its reputation as a first-day icebreaker. Hunting for someone who has never eaten sushi drills the present perfect. Someone who is going to travel this summer drills future forms. Someone who would move abroad if they could drills the second conditional. Same movement, same energy, entirely different target structure.
Closing the loop in the third person
Stop the mingle while it is still noisy rather than when it dies out. Then take five minutes in a circle: each student reports one discovery about somebody else — "Mehmet drinks his tea without sugar and Selin speaks three languages". The report is where third-person -s finally gets practised under pressure, and it gives the activity a proper ending instead of a slow fade back to the desks.
Timing and level
A2 to B1, ten to fifteen minutes, no preparation. Announce the time limit before the first card is opened; a visible deadline produces the urgency the game needs. If a class finishes the eight names early, do not extend the clock — raise the target instead, or require that the next four names come from people they have not spoken to all week.
Goes well with
Further reading
Why Warm-Ups Matter — the first five minutes of a lesson
Group Dynamics in Large Classes — making thirty students talk