As part our week-long Spirit Week this week (hosted by our new Student Council, which I am advising and helping), we are hosting a school-wide challenge for a designated “Engineering Design Day” today.
My sixth grade science colleague, Lisa Rice, suggested this Marshmallow Tower Challenge as a way for our entire school to come together as designers. I love that! We hope all teachers take part, but there is no requirement. Lisa is collecting school-wide data, though, in hopes of sharing out a huge experiment across the building, and getting kids and teachers excited about engineering design.
Look who does the best in this TED presentation? The kindergarteners!
And notice the talk about “high stakes” (adding money reward to the challenge) and how the high stakes negatively impacted the creative design of the towers … I guess we could easily draw some parallels to the current educational climate of high-stakes testing, right?
Peace (in collaboration),
Kevin
What do you think about prompts in writing (or in this case engineering)? What is the difference between one that is artificial and one that feels organic and ‘right’? How do they fit with personal choice? How do you handle those who wish to opt out?
antispammitastical: real duly I could not believe what I was seeing. Real man. Big time real. Duly real. Duly. It was a spiral hotdog. I had heard rumor of them before, but now here it was duly real and real duly in front of me.