5 Minute Challenges!

As a "minds on" hook, we developed the idea that each meeting should include an "Instant Challenge". There were two reasons for this. The first, being due to the fact that it was important the students had fun and were engaged in the club as it replaced one of their Wednesday recesses. The second reason being that the instant challenges caused the students to use their leadership and team-working skills to successfully complete challenges. In working together cooperatively and exercising their strengths, students had to create plans, delegate tasks, work together, and be time efficient in order to win the challenge.

The challenges were meant to be fun, camp-like activities. The first challenge, as pictured above, was a challenge to create the highest free-standing structure out of dry spaghetti and tape. The groups had to work as teams and create a plan of out to do so. The result of this activity was lots of failure and laughs, but also lots of re-modeling ideas. Students were not discouraged by the failures in their groups, but instead tried new strategies.

Another example of an activity, pictured below, was where we asked students to stack cups into a pyramid with no hands. They were only allowed to use a rubber band, which every group member had to touch. Again, the activity was met with lots of laughs, failure and success. In these activities, we realized the importance of having students work together to problem solve, and many of these activities could be altered slightly for a math or science curriculum. Students from different classes bonded, and we saw the effects of community- building taking place.