Dear readers,

    If you had walked into my leadership class a few days ago, you would have been dumbfounded. Different from the typical scene of college students taking copious notes as a professor breezes through a lecture, you would have seen a bunch of 20-year-olds playing around with marshmallows and sticks of spaghetti.

    But a closer look would have revealed our true intentions: We were challenged to create the tallest standing structure with a marshmallow on top that we could, with the materials provided in addition to tape and string.

    Many of the teams, including mine, immediately took to brainstorming. After some discussion, we began setting up a base in the shapes of triangles and squares constructed with pasta. Then, we built upon the base by attaching spaghetti sticks vertically, as high as possible, while other teams took the time to build additional frames for support.

    The last step was to put the marshmallow on top. Some groups successfully completed their structure, while other groups’ structures collapsed under the additional weight, or toppled over because they were too top-heavy.

    In the end, two out of nine teams succeeded in creating the structure. Our team, sadly, had a tall standing structure that cracked in the middle when we attached the marshmallow.

    This game was not just a team-building exercise — it also served to illustrate the importance of being experimental and creative. We eventually learned that some kindergarteners take a drastically different approach to the task. Instead of spending time planning, they hit the ground running with construction and are creative and unconfined by what adults would call common knowledge, such as “triangular foundations are most solid.”

    Moreover, they experimented as they built, testing the model out with the marshmallow from time to time.

    As college students, we constantly grow from deeper comprehension of learned ideas. However, just like in the game we did in class, we should always be open and receptive to unconventional approaches by experimenting, thinking independently and thinking outside of the box, just as kindergarteners do.

    Sincerely,

    Bingyin