The Marshmallow Challenge!

This below activity was put together by Tom Wujec a fellow at Autodesk.

The Marshmallow Challenge is a remarkably fun and instructive design exercise that encourages teams to experience simple but profound lessons in collaboration, innovation and creativity.

The task is simple: In eighteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top.

Surprising lessons emerge when you compare teams’ performance. Who tends to do the worst? Why? Who tends to do the best? Why? What improves performance? What kills it?

If you need to kickstart a meeting, get a team into a creative frame of mind, or simply want to encourage your organization to think about what it takes to dramatically increase innovation, invest 45 minutes to run a Marshmallow_Challenge.

Do watch Tom speak at TED on this. Very engrossing video:

You can also find complete details of how to run such a workshop in Tom Wujecs website: http://www.marshmallowchallenge.com