3/7-3/13
As you walk into the school right now, the beauty and messiness of Rube Goldberg machines greets you. The older heroes spent two days during quest creating Rube Goldberg machines and are now spending hours before school and after school trying to make them work. “Failure” after “failure” and still they keep going for fun!
This description of engineering Rube Goldberg machines actually describes the CHOICE experiment quite well! Whether they are designing a Rube Goldberg machine, a studio system for accountability, creating loose parts play, planning their work cycle, or figuring out a way of helping another hero with a problem/disability, our heroes are not scared of failure. Our heroes see constraints as a challenge rather than a punishment, and recognize the never-ending process of improvement and growth!
In the Spark Studio… this week we read the book “Human Computer: Mary Jackson, Engineer”. We learned that Mary Jackson didn’t give up when life got hard. She kept trying. Heroes were challenged to use dry spaghetti noodles and marshmallows to create a structure that could hold up a book. Heroes collaborated with one another, tested their structures, failed, made adjustments, and tried again.
During morning tribe time heroes are practicing the skills of planning their day and managing their time. The heroes boundary is to complete their core skills (math, language, reading, and writing) before moving onto other works in the studio. There is enormous freedom within that boundary. Some heroes decided that making a checklist of the core skills works they want to do is best for them. Other heroes decided that they want to work on language first every time. Each hero gets to make their own plan. Typically, heroes follow through with their plan, oft times they end up doing even more core skills works than they planned and then there are days when they struggle to complete their plans. When that happens, they come back the next day and try again!
Outside loose parts play was full of exploration this week. With all the snow and ice, heroes loved experimenting with the effects of water, ice, and snow. Heroes collected ice and watched what happened as they poured warm water on the ice. Other heroes created a catapult to launch snow into the air. They changed their design a few times, accounting for the best fulcrum, the best viewing spot, and the best size of snow chunks.
In the Fire Studio… this Wednesday the heroes all accepted a challenge inspired by the Paralympic athletes we learned about. Each hero agreed to live with a “disability” not of their choosing for the entire day. I expected the frustration and the empathy that the heroes reported at the end of the day. What surprised and delighted me was how they helped one another and the creative ways they invented to work around their challenges. They could have quit at any point; there was no reward for completion or punishment for quitting. They persevered and problem solved until the day was over.
Core Skills is a continual experiment of making a plan, succeeding, failing and trying again. At Town Hall on Thursday, the heroes decided to split the room into a solo area for those in lower Freedom Levels and a collaboration area for those in higher Freedom Levels. While the pictures below show the delightful collaboration that occurred, my highlight came at the end of Core Skills when a hero, in a lower Freedom Level sitting in the solo area, remarked, “sitting over here wasn’t a punishment, it was a help!
In Civ this week the heroes took on two Inca challenges. The first was to learn about and create a quipu which is a system of record keeping usually using knots spaced out to represent base 10 numbers. An ambitious group of heroes decided they wanted to make a quipu using base 2 numbers. They saw the challenge as fun! Next the heroes learned about the impressive grass suspension bridges that the Incas made. They then took on the challenge of creating a bridge out of twine that could hold up a person. The heroes added all kinds of creative energy to their bridges.
The Rube Goldberg analogy only goes so far. While some people claim that the creation of such a complex process to achieve simple goals such as washing your face or making a PB & J sandwich, is a waste of time, I cannot think of a better use of our time than using CHOICE’s processes to achieve our goals of self-sufficient, healthy, and joyful young people! Hooray for our Rube Goldberg machine!