Creativity is thinking up new things.
Innovation is doing new things.
Entrepreneurship adds a value perspective.
Just as you must exercise to keep your body fit, so you must exercise to keep your mind fit. That is what these innovation challenges are: workouts for your mind, creative hours that break up a busy working week, and an opportunity to work, learn, compete, succeed and fail in a creative, engaging and reflective manner. Inspired by the Challenge series at St Louis University, these sessions aim to "help participants to exercise their creative side, work in multidisciplinary teams, and experience team dynamics. They learn to tackle a novel situation under intense competitive time pressure, while networking with others outside their disciplines [and social circles, and year groups] and most importantly, fine-tuning their entrepreneurial skills." (Condoor and Keogh). This is learning that is experiential and rooted in the skills and relationships so crucial in the wider world.
The Queen Bee Challenge
The Challenge...
To build the tallest freestanding tower.
The height is measured from the base of the tower to the top.
Up to two team members can act as worker bees. Worker bees are blindfolded and are the ONLY ones who can touch, move, modify, and build the supplies.
The other member(s) act as queen bee(s) and can provide ONLY oral instructions.
Any peeking results in disqualification.
Time limit: 10 minutes to plan before the blindfolds go on, and 40 minutes to build the tower.
The Queen Bee Challenge stresses the need for planning, communication and trust. The blindfold is a metaphor for following instructions in total belief of other team members.
Lessons:
1. Emphasise the importance of planning as it reduces the need for a higher degree of communication.
2. Communicate precisely.
3. Trust the team and understand mutual dependence.
4. Overcome perceived and real barriers.
Lessons:
1. Emphasise the importance of planning as it reduces the need for a higher degree of communication.
2. Communicate precisely.
3. Trust the team and understand mutual dependence.
4. Overcome perceived and real barriers.
Reflection
After each challenge, students are invited to submit a reflection on their method and procedures relating to the challenge and their learning outcomes. Reflecting on all the aspects of the experience will improve their learning and give them the opportunity to realise that every experience, every success and every failure, offers you a chance to learn, improve and develop yourself. This reflexivity is arguably more important than the challenge itself. The best reflection will receive an award, and will be posted beneath each innovation challenge.
Winning Student Reflection: Jacob Sowter
I was a bit too ambitious when I suggested to my teammates that, ‘I should be a worker bee because I have the height to be able to reach up to the very top’ (There was also part of me that didn’t want to be known as a Queen… I’ve only just shook off King of the Fairies from Midsummer’s Night Dream!). And so, we introduced ourselves and quickly and confidently decided that we would create a base, and then use medium cups to stand on top, and small cups on top of those. It would be a good plan, supported by tape, ingenuity and precision.
Yeah? No.
The excellently thought through plan was neither excellent nor thought through. For starters, I didn’t take a look at the tape before starting so none of us had any idea how to open it, and so I resorted to a primitive, brutish attack on the tape in a wrestle that took ten minutes. First Lesson: Look for and then plan the unexpected - especially when Mr Boucher declares that, “Opening the tape is the first part of the challenge,” somewhat hinting that the tape might actually be difficult to unwind. I mean that’s not reading between the lines, it is reading on the lines! Second Lesson: Seek to succeed when other people do
not. Our team could have, and should have been able to capitalise on other groups being told off for not following rules. Third Lesson: Teachers do not always make up rules just because they had nothing else to chat about in the staff room. Anyway, all hope seemed lost, and I was less concerned with opening the tape and more concerned about working out where Mr Boucher was to throw this roll of tape at his head. Thankfully I managed to rip out the tape before I assaulted a teacher.
So, with the tape primed, I began moving cups around to get them in place. I built the initial circle of large plastic around to form the base fairly quickly thanks to fast and good communication, effectively turning into a fairground grabber which my teammates would guide through simple commands of forwards, backwards, left, right. Fourth Lesson: Simple and precise instructions are better than complicated instructions. However, it all went wrong when I had to tape the cups together. Holding two cups together with one hand, taping with the other hand is not easy. This suggested to me that actually having two people working would have been better (we had a ratio of 2:1 on queen:worker, not 1:2 which successful groups had). Fifth Lesson: Do work together, be prepared to collaborate with others to get a job done.
Eventually, we all ended up getting frustrated, and put the tape to one side and tried to do it without which turned out, as the fourth row was knocked over, was to our detriment. The entire structure collapsed because it was not secured with tape. Sixth Lesson: Use all available resources. If the tape was unimportant, it would not have been provided! Seventh Lesson: Keep cool when things go wrong, do not panic or get angry. This happened to our team and subsequently we had nothing with five minutes to go, leading to a mad dash stacking effort to just get some entry instead of nothing. Eighth Lesson: try to do the best in the face of adversity. We could have given up and sat around but instead we just decided to attempt to get some entry, even though we knew it could not possibly win.
Ninth Lesson: Reflect on things. I had not realised quite how much this exercise teaches you about teamwork until sitting down to write this!