Which women in history and the present day inspire you? What makes them so inspirational? Think about the areas of life or work you are particularly passionate about. Let’s turn these Inspirational Women into top trumps and spread the knowledge of them with your friends!
Inspirational Women
History has generally been written by white men. As a result many of the people who we find out about in history lessons at school, or mainstream history books, are white men too. Do some reading and build up a list of inspirational women who you may not have heard of before.
You could take a look at these women who changed history to get some ideas. Or check out the world’s current inspirational women in BBC’s pick of 100 women from 2019.
What have you found out about the people you have researched? You could choose a theme for your cards – ‘Inspirational Women in STEM’ or ‘Inspirational Young Women and Girls’. Or decide on a range of women from different backgrounds and sectors.
Make your selection, now use your research to create a fun game to play with friends or family…
Top Trump cards
Have a look at the information you have about each of your inspirational women. Come up with categories for the game (this is how you will eventually win if you ‘trump’ the other cards).
Some ideas for categories – Courage, Intelligence, Recognition Rating, Inspiration Rating, Change Maker. You may also want to choose some categories that are fixed rather than subjective, such as year of birth, height, age now (or when they died) etc. Make up whichever categories you want but all the cards need to have the same ones.
Print out and use the template cards attached to this activity, or design your own. Print out or draw a picture of each of the women for their card.
Creating Your Game
Rate the women you have chosen in each of your categories. You may need to do some more research in order to discover or decide their score for each of your categories.
For example, Malorie Blackman (author of books for young people, including Noughts and Crosses and the eighth Children’s Laureate in the UK). If you have enjoyed her books, you might give her a very high inspiration rating. You could decide on a high ‘change maker’ rating as her books have made a big difference to the kinds of stories being told for young people. She might have a middling Recognition Rating as she is known within publishing, but is not internationally well known by her name.
Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova is inspirational — she was the first woman to travel into space in 1963. Before then she was a textile factory worker and an amateur skydiver. In August 1970, she was among the first group of living people to have a lunar crater named after them — Tereshkova crater is on the far side of the moon. In 1963 very few people had been into space at all, so her bravery rating would need to be pretty high!
How to play
Once you have made your cards you are ready to play Inspirational Women Top Trumps with someone at home or your friends.
Divide the cards between those playing
Only looking at your top card choose a category and say it out loud with your card’s score e.g. “Intelligence 5.” Everyone else playing must look at the same category on their card and read out what they have. Whoever has the highest number wins everyone’s cards in the round.
Repeat until one person has all the cards.
Keep looking up and looking out for inspirational women (they are everywhere!). Add to your pack as you go along.
Take it Further
Did this activity get you thinking about the hidden and missing parts of our history? If you want to think a bit more about this, you could try doing our activity History Gap.
