The “Marshmallow Challenge” (again)
We just conducted the “Marshmallow Challenge” in a group of 60+ university students, and I’m realising that I’ve been facilitating this activity for over a decade. I’ve been lucky to do this both as a participant and as a tutor in a variety of contexts and cultures in Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. I keep learning from this rather simple hands-on session, so I thought I’d write something about it.
Even before going into the activity, just looking at the search trends is itself informative: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=marshmallow%20challenge. First, the term clearly took off after Tom Wujec’s TED Talk in February 2010, nothing surprising there but just to mention that people had been doing this activity for many years prior. Tom’s talk and website are great, though this also means that every year more people are aware of the activity. I guess we will have to keep tweaking it to make it relevant. On this note, I’ve actually implemented this activity with many considerable variations: giving fake money to teams so that they can purchase more or different materials, giving some teams twice as many strands of spaghetti, introducing rules for team formation, etc. Also possibly interesting from the trends that this activity “peaks” every year around August/September, and that Singapore, the USA, Canada, and Hong Kong are the places most interested in it.
Wujec’s talk covers a range of lessons to think about, yet its emphasis on the Financial Crisis of 2008/09 is now dated, and it gives priority to issues of collaboration. These are obviously important, but there many other angles about this activity that are worth discussing depending on the crowd and the specific content being covered. This is why, I think, I like the Marshmallow Challenge: it is a fun activity (which is harder than one would think), it is very hands-on and collaborative, and it is easy to scale-up. Supermarkets around the world stock the materials needed, and these are low cost. Only paper/cardboard-based activities are better in this way. I do like using building blocks (like Lego), but they are bulky to carry around, and unfortunately, most universities can’t deal properly with such requests: too expensive as class materials, and not expensive enough as infrastructure investment. It is a shame, I admit, to waste food like this, but given the potential lessons to be learned, I’d say that the cost/benefit analysis is still positive. Also, the competitive aspect of it isn’t ideal, as it perpetuates zero-sum outcomes, but to that point, one can argue that teams learn from what other teams do as well, so there is some “collaboration” when it comes to the learning side of it.
Now to the activity (trying to not give too much away), these are some key ideas and questions supported by this activity:
1. Materials are important. Physicality is a means to think and generate ideas that is often neglected, particularly in a screen-based world. Get the hell away from your keyboard, mouse, joystick and screen. Use objects and materials around you, and use them as means to be creative.
2. Cheap materials are important. Some people assume that it’s good to spend money to build and evaluate ideas. I was once in an institution that gave design teams $1,000 for their projects. Next year we cut it to $500 and the following year to $300. Guess what happened in terms of quality of ideas? Here’s a hint: go and grab readily available materials, junk, rubbish, and low-cost items that you can use freely and not feel guilty about “wasting”. Never think that design and creativity is an area where you can solve a problem by “throwing money at it”. Yes, ideation does seem wasteful to the untrained eye, and it is resource-intensive, so best if you prepare and recycle and reuse.
3. Hands-on building in teams is engaging. Combining materiality with orchestrating action in a small team is quite powerful. Granted, some teams are more conducive to engagement than others, and one interesting discussion point is how teams “self-organise” and how people build the “atmosphere” of the team and then that atmosphere “responds” and shapes how people feel and behave. Some teams include a passive observer, other teams have an authoritative leader who gives instructions, other teams are quite flat and cooperative. There is no recipe, and “success” occurs in various types of teams. But, frankly, who wants to work with a**holes?
4. Instructions and facilitation. I’ve seen the Marshmallow Challenge being conducted in rather poor conditions and led rather poorly. Granted, some spaces are more appropriate, and some groups are a delight to observe how they embrace and enjoy the activity, whilst others can be more dull and cynical. It is always interesting though to see how humans are predisposed to “cheat”, there is invariably someone who probes to see if they can “bend” the rules, or just goes ahead and does it. It is important to remind people that this is an “honest” activity, in that there isn’t any trick involved. I blame “creativity coaches and gurus” who do often pose stupid and tricky puzzles to “test” the creativity of audiences.
5. Iteration. Won’t say much about this, but the activity is particularly useful for people to grasp a solid idea of the difference between having an idea and then building/coding it, and developing your ideas as you tentatively examine ways of implementing them. It seems that this isn’t natural for most people, and you can’t really explain what this means until you actually do it. Opportunities to talk about failure are strong after this activity.
6. Time. Today we saw only two teams (out of 12) finishing a self-standing structure in the 18 minutes available. By the way, I think that giving teams 6 minutes would increase the success rate, in a way 18 minutes is too long, but that is just a hunch. Interestingly, today as we watched the video, two other teams managed to finish their towers and these were higher than the first two. This created a good occasion to talk about how creative ventures usually go over budget and time, and how “nailing” the timeframe in every creative project is a skill that we all should aspire to develop.
I’ve run out of time and I’m sure there are a few more topics to cover here. Will try to create a follow-up post, especially if/when I see questions or issues raised by others.
