Marshmallow Challenge
Asides
Here’s an interesting TED talk on a team challenge on building the tallest structure with twenty sticks of spaghetti and a marshmallow. See why kindergarten students do better than business school graduates. (Hint: Learning by shipping.)
i’ve seen this done at summer camps… awesome!
I get my classes to do this and they love it. Only thing is the marshmallow they get is the smallest I can ever find and they still manage to split t up and build incredible works of spaghetti architecture!
In fact I don’t give them strong or tape and tell them to build it just out of spaghetti and marshmallows!
Great video, thanks for sharing. Hope you make it to WordCamp ATL again!
The kindergarten kids just reinforce the old saw: “Begin with the end in mind.”
Actually they do and don’t; they win, i.e. get the height, because the do, experiment, revise and try something different; playing towards the end they do indeed have in their wonderfully unimpressed minds.
We do this and similar exercises with our Junior Achievement students during breaks in our larger programs. Design patterns emerge but creativity breeds novel solutions every year. So fun to watch.
Great stuff!!! There are other reasons why kids do better. There are no preconceived notions about anything. Everything in life is an experiment where there is no such thing as failure. Thomas Edison once said about his lightbulb invention..he never had a failure, he only had leaning experiences how not to do something.
Awesome video! It was interesting to see that the kindergarten students performed better than most of the other groups. I took part in this challenge when I was at college, it’s definitely a great activity for team building and problem solving! Thanks for sharing!
~ Claire
Maybe business consultants should play this game with entrepreneurs instead of writing an un-prototyped businessplan
I’ve used the toolkit many times; it really works — don’t forget the precise instructions, timing and music
Great TedTalk! Just gotta love the fact that kindergartners outclassed nearly everyone else.