Marshmallow Challenge

As I think back on my summer, I have decided to write a post on what I felt was one of the most successful activities we did with the PASS students. The marshmallow challenge is an activity that is done to promote teamwork within many different types of groups from business executives to kindergarten students. I discovered this activity from a TED talk I watched on how to facilitate collaboration and cooperation in a group environment. At this point in time, we had been running the PASS program for a couple of weeks and the kids were often getting in arguments and having difficulty working together. I thought this activity would be a good way to bring everyone together to reach a common goal. The activity challenges a small team to create a tower that can support a large Jet-Puff marshmallow within nothing but a yard of tape, a yard of string and twenty sticks of raw spaghetti. The goal is to make the tower as tall and as sturdy as possible in just thirty minutes. For this activity we had three teams of three randomly chosen individuals. I have to admit, I wasn't sure if any of the teams would be successful in supporting the marshmallow, not because they weren't capable of building the tower, but I assumed lack of cooperation and communication would prevent them from achieving success. I was very impressed to see that when the challenge began and the clock started ticking the students did a great job of communicating and respecting each other's ideas. While two of the groups weren't quite able to support the marshmallow by the time the challenge was up, their designs were very good and more importantly the teamwork they demonstrated was fantastic. The third group did manage to get the marshmallow supported at a height of 22 inches, well above the national average according the marshmallowchallenge.com. This group was so proud of their tower they asked to display it on the windowsill for the rest of the summer. After the activity we discussed what worked and what didn't work in terms of teamwork and communication and the kids showed a lot of good insight and showed that they really did gain a lot from the challenge. With our main goal being to help these kids gain classroom skills, and with collaboration and teamwork being such an important classroom and life skill to have, I would say we made some major progress this day. It also showed me that I really underestimated these kids and just what they were capable of, something I wouldn't do again. For better or worse, they showed me that I needed to hold them to a higher standard and push them harder in the classroom so that they could really get the most out of the program.