Spontaneity Challenges, Planning, and Building

For a change, this is going to be a short post!

We bought what we learnt from last weeks Spontaneous Attack session and shared it with the teams. It was challenging, but the kids stepped up to it, and did well. The toughest point was the (quite common rule for spontaneous problems) that if one team member is stuck, the whole team is stuck. We briefly discussed some strategies- like choosing a couple of favorite topics that you know really well, that you can answer almost any question about. We're going to discuss other strategies to try at next weeks session.

And then the two teams moved onto their long term problems. In the structure team, which I co-coach, we started by going over the problem again, particularly the scoring. The team discovered that there are a lot of points available for the style parts of the challenge. It got them thinking about the other parts of the challenge. Then the team decided that they wanted to start building! They used popsicle sticks to try some of their ideas; we all wanted to save our precious balsa wood. The scale might be wrong, but they're easy to work with to try out their design ideas.

One thing that proved really helpful for the structure team was a suggestion from a couple of the other coaches (Sarah and Gail- thanks!): create some sort of analogue of the volumes mentioned in the problem description, for the unfolded and folded states of the structure. I grabbed a box and chopped it up to create three, 3 sided, rectangular 'open' prisms. It really helped the team visualize the dimensions involved.

I only briefly saw our Goldberg team's machine, but from the little I saw I'm excited to see more next week!

Thanks this week to all the parent helpers who stayed- especially Neville, who sorted out my dis-organized story card, Gisela for organizing snacks, and Pam who helped judge some of the spontaneous challenge practices.