Before I do the individual reflection, this post is going to need a little back story.
The first assignment was to do the Marshmallow Challenge, which really is an easy challenge. You are provided with 20 straws of spaghetti, one meter of masking tape, one pair of scissors and supposedly a piece of string. I did not see the string, but there are tales of its existence. The group is divided into groups of approximately four people and they are tasked with building a structure which is the tallest while still being able to hold a marshmallow on the top of it (or wherever really, but you want the marshmallow to be as high as possible as it is the point of measure). For this the teams are given 18 minutes. To read more about it, you can visit the official page by clicking here, or copying and pasting this link into your web browser:
http://marshmallowchallenge.com/Welcome.html
Down below is my individual reflection.
I guess everyone reacts differently to challenges, I generally try to embrace them. I enjoy a good challenge. I got a little hyped up, and having done something similar I felt somewhat confident. We started right away, with creating triangles, with somewhat of a plan – triangles on the horizontal plane and having cut up pasta straws on the vertical plane. We started off with everyone trying to make triangles, which the person in the middle then taped together.
In hindsight, we realised we should have done some things differently. Because we built everything to be about the same width, the structure quickly got unstable – when you have the centre of mass up high, the base needs to be wider or anchored properly. We did neither. Building upon that we were not super good with tape either, and the pasta straws were not as precise as we would have wanted them to be. We figured we should have done some things differently, one thing being prototyping, another being building in more of a pyramid like structure. But all and all it went okay, we got it to stand for ten seconds, and I got a picture of it!
Edit: The name of my group is Brains – Ground Zero and it consists of me, Nathan, Franz and Sulekha.
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