With this activity, I gave the students the choice to work in pairs of in a group of 3-4 (based on the number of people in their table group). Students did a great job of choosing their groups and working together. I thought being off for a bit on break would be a little rough on getting back into the routine of communicating and collaborating, but the students did an awesome job! I asked them to use the task cards to build the given structures however they wanted to (it did not have to look just like the picture), but they had to show a teacher before they could move on to the next card. Some groups had to do some revising on their creations as we could not really tell what they were, significant details were missing, or was sloppy work. Those groups really only had to be send back once as they spent more time on their future designs, making sure they were meeting expectations.
Some of the awesome things I saw while students were building:
- One group made not only a cup of hot chocolate, but also a little barista stand to dispense the hot chocolate.
- One group spent almost the entire time building the cup of hot chocolate. The amount of redesign that took place in this group of 4 was countless, but they were never discouraged. They all wanted elements of their design to be incorporated and worked hard to make it happen. Their LARGE cup had a transparent side so you could see how much hot chocolate you had inside of your cup, a straw to drink out of, marshmallows, and a sturdy handle.
- Students did not stray from the task that I gave them and began building other things. They really stuck to the task and worked collaboratively.
- Some students really needed the pictures on the task cards to make meaning of what they were being asked to build. I intentionally put black and white images so that they would be able to use the images as context clues, but use their imagination to build creatively.