J. McKenzie Hansen

Marshmallow Tower Challange

1. Was there a leader in your group?   Who was it and who decided who the leader would be?
2. If you had no leader, do you think having designated someone a leader would have helped?
3. How helpful was everyone on your team in the process of building the tallest structure?  Did anyone appear to be an expert?
4. Did any team members tune out the activity–out of frustration with other members or for some other reason?  What could you have done to keep all members of the group fully engaged?
5. Did you feel everyone’s ideas were well received during the activity?
6. How did you feel as the time limit was approaching?  Did pressure increase?  If yes, was that helpful or not?
7. In retrospect, what could you have done differently throughout this process?

Within my group there was not really a leader. Layne and Colby did more talking and were the first ones to make a move in how to create the tower. I honestly think that our group did better without a designated leader. I am a planner, but I liked how we just tested different ideas and talked to each other without a specific person coming up with all of the ideas.

I personally feel as if I was not very much help. I was very quiet at the beginning because I have done this activity MANY times, and I make my EAST students do it too, so I was thinking of what methods worked and which ones didn’t. I didn’t start to speak up until five minutes in after I thought about how we can go about doing this by incorporating my team’s ideas with the ideas I pulled from previous experiences. Layne and Colby seemed to be the brain behind the whole thing. Jason joined in after a plan was sort of developed and then I joined in to help create a solution to the bending base problem.

I believe my team and I worked well together. No one seemed irritated with one another. I think honestly we all wanted someone else to speak up with ideas or praises to make sure everyone was still agreeing with what was going on. And time was not a factor for us. It was plentiful! We were able to finish our tower on time, even though we had trouble getting it to stand up.

If we had to do this activity again, I believe we would need some more communication or thinking out loud. I know I was guilty of wanting to figure it out “by myself” and did not really include my team members in my thought process. I think part of the reason I did that is because I am a control freak and I knew that if I took charge, they might not have had anything to do. Overall though, I am very impressed with our (fallen) tower because it stayed up when it needed to and I am proud of my team for accomplishing the goal!