For students to achieve their maximum potential, integrated teamwork is absolutely vital. Teamwork must be developed on multiple levels: between students, students and teachers, and between parents and teachers. With more teamwork skill emphasis, more opportunities will exist for students to collaboration in solving complex problems.

Jennifer Lee Magas, Clinical Associate Professor of Public Relations in the Media, Communications, and Visual Arts Department at Pace University states this. “Outside of school, the working world is all about communicating with other people…but working with others can be hard. Managing time, planning meet-ups and functioning as one entity takes practice and loads of patience… Teamwork is always an incredible lesson and an excellent way to gather basic life skills that make you a better candidate for any position in the business world.”

Whether in a classroom or business setting, teamwork reflects a set of skills that must be developed and reinforced over time. This week, I am sharing a third fun, low-cost activity for your consideration.

Activity #3- Spaghetti Tower

For Virtual Instruction Using Smart Phones and Jamboard

1. Present each individual participant with the following challenge: Using materials easily accessible at home (dry spaghetti, marshmallows, string, tape, glue, etc.), build a spaghetti tower. Before starting your construction, decide on the construction criteria you will use to determine successful completion of your tower:
   • tallest tower
   • most creative tower
   • most stable tower
   • or some other criteria
2. After students have completed the construction of their individual spaghetti towers, have each take a picture of their tower with a phone/camera.
3. Using Zoom or Google Meets, divide your students or employees into breakout groups of 4.
4. Within each breakout group, provide time for each member to link to their respective Jamboard slide and upload the picture of their spaghetti tower.

Be sure to make a copy of the Jamboard to your Google drive and select “editor” privilege for participants.

5. The challenge for each group is to determine, by consensus, which criteria is most important to consider for tower construction. Use this criteria to select “the best tower” representation for the group.

6. Pose the following discussion questions:

• How effectively did all members of the breakout team work together to complete the task?
• What cumulative skills were used to complete the task?
• What unique skill(s) did each member contribute to completing the task?
• What criteria did your group use to determine successful completion of a spaghetti tower construction (height, creativity, stability, etc.)?

For Face-to-Face Instruction

1. Divide students or employees into teams of 4. Provide them with ‘building’ materials, such as dry spaghetti, marshmallows, string and tape.
2. Set a time limit for designing and building a spaghetti tower that’s structurally sound.
3. When their time is up, pose the following discussion questions:

Enjoy this third team-building activity. Stay healthy and safe!

Dean