Innovation is doing new things...
The Challenge
Students are asked to construct the tallest freestanding tower using 20 spaghetti sticks, a meter of sellotape and a meter of string, placing a marshmallow at the top of the structure. All this has to be completed working within mixed teams of different age groups inside an 18 minute time limit.
This task, while apparently innocuous and trivial, has been undertaken by tens of thousands of participants across all continents, spanning nursery-age children to CEO's of multinational corporations, to enable participants to achieve a greater understanding of the importance of collaboration and process within a creative, design-driven, competitive framework.
Skills Takeaway
This Innovation Challenge forces you to look beyond the simplistic premise of the task in order to set it within its wider context, both in terms of previous particpants' experiences but also in relation to skills. The core skill taught was transformative, innovative creativity: constructing one product out of a variety of totally different, completely unrelated ones requires skill, imaginative, visual collaboration and design thinking.
However, a great number of other skills were also addressed here, not least:
1. Adept time management... The 18-minute deadline gives you ample time to negotiate (or jockey for) your position within a new group, discuss, plan, design and execute your ideas - while not necessarily giving you enough time to incorporate into that revisions and adaptations if such stages are not embedded in the process from the start. Thus, the time limit forces you to reconsider how you spend your time and what your process looks like.
2. Prototyping and Adaptability... The more successful participants here are not just the ones who are well versed in the inherent geometrics of scaleable construction - those who devise and revise prototypes rapidly, responding to failure and setbacks and devising working solutions that push you closer to success, achieve extremely highly as well.
3. Self-motivation... Particularly pertinent for our students, there was a real question about how we saw our own expectations, how we drive and demand more from ourselves, how we set our own standards and goals, and what role complacency or apathy plays in all of this.
Reflection
As after every innovation challenge, students are invited to submit a reflection on their method and procedures relating to the challenge and their learning outcomes. Winning is not the purpose of the Innovation Challenges: learning is. Reflecting on the aspects of the experience will give you the chance to realise that every experience, every success and failure, offers a chance to learn, improve and develop. The best reflections are the ones that are personal, and the winning pieces posted on this site give a rich indication as to the type of content that is judged most effective - that is, authentic, individualised reflections on the personal reverberations of this small experience. The winning piece receives an award, and will be posted beneath each challenge.
As after every innovation challenge, students are invited to submit a reflection on their method and procedures relating to the challenge and their learning outcomes. Winning is not the purpose of the Innovation Challenges: learning is. Reflecting on the aspects of the experience will give you the chance to realise that every experience, every success and failure, offers a chance to learn, improve and develop. The best reflections are the ones that are personal, and the winning pieces posted on this site give a rich indication as to the type of content that is judged most effective - that is, authentic, individualised reflections on the personal reverberations of this small experience. The winning piece receives an award, and will be posted beneath each challenge.