Today we borrowed a really fun, team-based activity from our colleagues at Wide Horizons, Community Development Program: THE GREAT EGG DROP!! (Thanks for the idea!)
This activity requires teams of 3-4 students to complete the following objective: "DON'T break your egg when you drop it from a high place." Students used a project planning cycle to prepare for the egg drop wherein they 1. Identified Needs (of the egg) 2. Planned & Prepared (a protection container for the egg 3. Implemented (dropped the egg) 4. Assessed (did the egg survive?) 5. Evaluated (was your plan successful? what was easy / difficult?).
The first round, students could use any materials they wanted, which led to some incredibly protective and complex containers. All eggs survived, and students recognized that it was easy to meet the objective because they had so many resources.
So, to make it more challenging, we did it again with very, very few resources! Not a single egg survived, unfortunately, and students recognized that they were so close to meeting the objective, they just needed a few additional resources.
Luckily, we had one egg left! So the students all worked together in one large group, bringing their own experiences together to create one final container that used just a few resources. It survived!
Lastly, we connected the use of this project planning cycle to the teaching cycle (just substitute "Teach" for "Implementation." This was an apt metaphor with the egg symbolizing a student! As a final review, students categorized a list of 42 actions with where they would fall within the teaching cycle.
This review was fun and extremely useful as our student teachers will be using the teaching cycle many times this year once their teaching practicum begins!
Check out all the great pictures we took during this activity!
This activity requires teams of 3-4 students to complete the following objective: "DON'T break your egg when you drop it from a high place." Students used a project planning cycle to prepare for the egg drop wherein they 1. Identified Needs (of the egg) 2. Planned & Prepared (a protection container for the egg 3. Implemented (dropped the egg) 4. Assessed (did the egg survive?) 5. Evaluated (was your plan successful? what was easy / difficult?).
The first round, students could use any materials they wanted, which led to some incredibly protective and complex containers. All eggs survived, and students recognized that it was easy to meet the objective because they had so many resources.
So, to make it more challenging, we did it again with very, very few resources! Not a single egg survived, unfortunately, and students recognized that they were so close to meeting the objective, they just needed a few additional resources.
Luckily, we had one egg left! So the students all worked together in one large group, bringing their own experiences together to create one final container that used just a few resources. It survived!
Lastly, we connected the use of this project planning cycle to the teaching cycle (just substitute "Teach" for "Implementation." This was an apt metaphor with the egg symbolizing a student! As a final review, students categorized a list of 42 actions with where they would fall within the teaching cycle.
This review was fun and extremely useful as our student teachers will be using the teaching cycle many times this year once their teaching practicum begins!
Check out all the great pictures we took during this activity!
Round One: unlimited resources!
Posted by Bop Htaw Education Empowerment Program on Thursday, July 2, 2015