Building a Better Team

This week, fourth grade scientists used mini marshmallows and long pieces of pasta to explore teamwork and the engineering design process. Lower School Science Teacher Grace Crowell challenged her students to work in small teams to build the tallest tower possible using only marshmallows, spaghetti, tape, and string. Students were encouraged to test out their ideas and rework their designs to improve their stability and height. For example, many students initially assumed that connecting strands of spaghetti with marshmallows in a long series would be the fastest way the achieve the tallest structure. But, those structures were fragile and unwieldy. Instead, students found that breaking the pasta strands into smaller pieces connected by more marshmallows created a far more sturdy design as the height increased. Square structures were also increasingly replaced by triangular-shaped structures as the fourth graders found that shape to be more durable.

While students were busy designing and constructing, Grace was focused on a different set of skills. “I was interested in observing their communication skills,” she says, “and whether students got upset when their ideas were not utilized, who took the lead, and which groups made sure that everyone’s voices were heard.” Each group sketched and measured the height of their final design and then wrote up an evaluation of the exercise in their science journals. They wrote about how their team worked together, why their structures were successful (or not!), and what they would do differently if they encountered the same challenge again.

Fourth graders will be using their science journals throughout the year to write down their questions, answers, record information, and observations. Discussing “noticings” and “wonderings” will also be a regular feature of the class as students delve into topics that they are curious about and grow to appreciate how many of those questions are connected in some way to science. 

In the front of their science journals, Grace asked each student to write their goals for the year. Grace gave one of the students in each class a ball of red yarn and asked them to share one of their goals with the rest of the class. Holding on to the end of the string, they then threw it across the circle to another student who shared one of their goals. When the class was finished, they had created a “crazy web” with each student holding on to a piece of the edge. “It helped them see that even though everyone has different goals, we are super interconnected,” says Grace, “because our commonality is our joy for learning about science.”