Ten Marshmallow Challenges

On the 18th and 25th of May, the class did a marshmallow challenge. The class was divided into group of 4 and I had Zhang, Yoshiki and Kenta in my group. The task was to construct a freestanding object consisted of spaghetti that has marshmallow on top of it.

In our first challenge, we struggled quite a lot and as a result we failed. What we have done fine was that we started building after discussing. What we have done wrong was that we have took too much time discussing. We talked for more the 10 minutes (despite the fact that we only have 18 minutes in total) and tried to complete the building in the last few minutes. We all wanted to make it as high as possible so that was why we discussed too much. What we were supposed to do was to discuss just a little bit and spend more time on actually building it. We constantly had to both discuss and construct the tower.

In the last ten minutes of the first marshmallow challenge class, we have compared our objects with the other groups’ and we have also took a look at marshmallow challenges done at places other than our school.

We used the time for discussion as little as possible and then started building at earlier time. We first did think of making the base as a triangle but it was actually difficult doing that so we made the shape of the base as square and then tried to compile up the similar shape as the base on top of it. We were able to stick the spaghetti with the tape and make it stable. In the last few minutes of the challenge, we did not know how we should put the marshmallow on top but as we didn’t have a lot of time, we just made a marshmallow go through the spaghetti and taped that to the base. It seemed a bit unstable after the marshmallow was placed on top so we fixed it with tape in the last few seconds. Although it was not so high and was approximately 30 cm, we achieved the goal so that was