Successful Marshmallow Challenge in Web Design Class!

After my students did their bellringer (Mondays we do the agoogleaday.com activity) and I chatted with them for a bit, I put them in groups of 3 or 4 for the Marshmallow Challenge.

If you've never heard of it, there's a TED talk discussing it (which I showed at the end of class) that is about 7 minutes long. As the TED talk led me to believe would happen, most of my students did exactly as he described--they waited until 2 minute warning to put that marshmallow on top! I found it so funny that he said Kindergartners usually tried the marshmallow on top from the beginning.

In my 3rd hour class, we had 9 groups. Only 5 had a structure that could support the marshmallow after 18 minutes. In my 7th hour class, we had 5 groups. Get this--only ONE group had a structure that worked!

And, I used a mini marshmallow (which should be easier) and not a standard size as described in the instructions (since that's all the Dollar Tree had that day).  We ended up with many "leaning designs" as you can see in the pictures.

For debriefing, I showed the TED talk and then talked about the importance of testing prototypes along the way and not waiting until the end. I explained that coding is a process. Do what you know is easiest first--structure tags (doctype, html, head, title, body) and immediately save and test to be sure your title is appearing in the tab. Then, move from there, do a bit, and test it. As we all know, you can make such simple errors in coding and it's much easier to test along the way than to spend a half hour typing and then have to dig through that much code to find the errors.

It went over really well and they seemed to work well together and enjoy it. Success! This is definitely happening again next semester with my next batch of Web Design students!

And, hey, as a bonus I'd say we worked on some great 21st century skills of problem solving, critical thinking and collaboration. It was a good day.