Description
(Competing) teams have to build tall towers with the provided resources. This game is a creative engineering task that requires planning but also experiment. The goal is to translate an idea into practice. As always in life, talking about something is much easier than doing it 😉 In the corporate environment, this is a classic fun team-building activity since it requires good communication to get it done quickely.
What do you need?
- One pack of spaghetti, shashlik sticks, toothpicks or straws
- One marshmallow per team
- One roll of scotch tape
- One scissors per team
Let’s do it!
Teams need to build a tower as high as possible with a marshmallow on top within a limited time, e.g. 5 minutes. The highest tower wins – the marshmallow is the measuring point.
In order to win, the tower needs to stand free on the floor or the table and it needs to stand longer than 10 sec before it collapses.
What makes this an agile parenting tool?
Participants can do a review after the activity and reflect about the result of their work:
- How many ways have we tried until we found the right way?
- What did you learn from the fails?
- What would you do differently when we play the game again?
Furthermore, participants can do a retrospective, reflecting more about the team dynamics:How did you support each other to make the tower?
- How did you support each other to make the tower?
- Did we have a good way to make decisions?
- Did we enjoy working on this together?
Play with us!
Do you know a similar activity that triggers discussions on how to enhance work results and communication? Please share your ideas with us and the agile parenting community and write them into the comments box.