The Marshmallow challenge

I don’t often curate other people’s content. Nor do I often write about something I haven’t fully thought through, but today I’m making an exception on both counts.The Marshmallow Project, if you haven’t already heard about it, is, as with all brilliant ideas, a simple precept: in eighteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top.

The results turn out to be profound, as the following 6 minute video shows. I’m not going to attempt to summarize what Tom Wujec discovered, as it deserves to be heard directly from him. If you’re involved with teams of any sort, I strongly urge you to watch this: