Archive for February 11th, 2011

This could be a game to encourage creativity and teamwork. Just like the contest called “Junk in the Box” (http://www.nbc.com/minute-to-win-it/how-to/episode-126/junk-in-the-trunk/) in Minute to Win It (the tv show), we provide some basic items such as empty Kleenex boxes (reusing!), ping pong balls and some sort of securing material (what can we reuse?), and the students have to design their own “regulation” boxes. They can design and test perhaps one or two days before the contest. We can also think up some twists to this game.

Reminded again about all the design flaws of the Y2E2, would it be interesting to have students do a compare and contrast exercise? They would really only have to jot down notes as they do it, then we could get them onto PostIts and categorize each of them into “hit”, “miss”, “huge success”, “big failure”, “good try”, “could be better” and “what were they thinking?” These are all ways we personally evaluate innovations. Things we could use for this exercise:

(1) Y2E2 vs the Huang Building,
(2) Y2E2 vs an older building on campus,
(3) Coke vs Pepsi,
(4) Chinese language vs English language,
(5) iPad vs iPhone (or something similarly techie but audience would want to learn more about)