MakerSpace (Grade 5 and 6) - Learning the Design Process

Once a week students in grades 5 and 6 have a chance to use the wonderful new MakerSpace at CDS.  The students started this year by competing in the Marshmallow Challenge.  The challenge asks teams of 3 or 4 students to create the tallest, free-standing structure they can using only 20 sticks of spaghetti, 1m of tape, and 1m of string.  Their structure also had to support a marshmallow on top.  Teams had 18 minutes to complete the project.  

After the project students debriefed their personal strategies we watched a TED talk on the iterative design process.  Interestingly, this challenge has been given across the country to people of all ages and one of the most successful groups of people at the challenge are recent graduates of... kindergarten.  They outperform CEOs!  The reason they are so successful is that they continually test their designs throughout the build process.  They get immediate feedback and have time to correct for design failures.  Conversely, CEOs and businesses school graduates spend most of their time jockeying for power, planning, and then finally building.  By the time they ever test their design it is too late to make any corrections and their "Ta-da!" moment turns into an "Uh-oh!" moment.  We had a bit of both during our challenge, but the students learned a valuable lesson on testing their designs and making adjustments throughout the design process.

For more information and the TED talk visit:  http://marshmallowchallenge.com/Welcome.html