Well, we’re a month – more or less – into the new year. This year, the big project is working with a group of middle school (grade 5-8) students, and trying to get them to actively problem solve in real time. Here’s the scenario: A group of 20-25 kids working in pairs. Each team has a few lego sets. Every day there is a “lesson” and a “challenge”. The students have the option of doing either the lesson, the challenge, or just playing around with the legos. There is no requirement to do any particular activity, no records are kept, there are no grades, etc.
On the first couple of days, the kids pretty much ignored both the challenges and the lessons. They played with the legos, and made some pretty impressive structures – cars, houses, hotels and such. Then, one of the challenges really clicked. It was a pretty simple one – given an inclined plane (a tabletop six feet long, with one end lifted about a foot, and a “ramp” at the end to provide a smooth transition to the floor), build something that will roll or slide down the plane and either stop as quickly as possible, or go as far as possible.
One group took on the challenge – the undirected play was getting a bit boring – and as soon as the others saw the “car” zoom across the floor, they were all on it. It didn’t take long for them to all optimize their distance vehicles because they shared ideas, copied, and pretty quickly optimized their options. Once they had more or less maxed out the distance challenge, about half of the kids moved back into free building (but with a lot more emphasis on movement now), about a quarter of them kept running their distance cars down the ramp and tweaking them, and the rest started working on the “fast stop” challenge.
Once again, as soon as one group had their marks down, the other groups quickly joined in. Because there are a lot more ways to slow down the “car”, there was a lot more variation in the vehicles – from having wheels rub the body, to using dragging parts, and even a couple of high friction gear trains and a sail.
It has been truly gratifying to watch these kids pull together and figure out ways to have “cooperative competition”. Instead of focusing on making sure that “I do best” the overall feeling is more of sharing ideas to “defeat” the challenge. Once all of the kids were working on the fast stop challenge, there were 5 or 6 different mechanisms that were being used to slow the cars down. As they compared methodologies, successes, and shared ideas as to how to improve each others designs, the groups would tend to coalesce around two or three models. Each group would still make their own version of the model, but they would share ideas with the other groups and work together to try and get the best result.
The best result: cars that would creep down the ramp and stop within 1″ of the bottom. The most creative? probably the car that was designed with an accidentally turned front wheels. Its path would curve until it was going sideways, then it would flip over a couple times and start again.
The most interesting observation: the teams that were most willing to use odd mechanisms were all girls. The boys tended to build fairly “standard” 4 wheel cars, and then try to figure out how to slow them down. The girls would come up with a way to make something go slow, then build around that. The boys were responsible for the models that worked best in the distance challenge, bit the girls came up with the ideas that worked best in the fast stop challenge.
This week, we’re starting to work with motors, so we’ll see where that goes….
