Held Together With Rubber Bands: Team-Building in Grade 5

One of the first projects Cam McNall devised five years ago for his students in the Innovation Lab—a fast-paced challenge to design a rubber-band maze for a wooden ball—has become an annual team-building exercise for the fifth grade as they begin each school year. The experience, both fun and frustrating at times, is yet another example of how, in the iLab, the simplest of materials can be transformed into powerful tools for learning.

The idea of the challenge is simple: students must create a series of increasingly diabolical mazes using nothing more than wooden pegboards, nails, and rubber bands. The goal of the assignment is somewhat more complex. On the one hand, creating the mazes helps students get back into the swing of working in the iLab at the start of a new school year. On the other hand, and more importantly, the exercise of designing the puzzles with classmates forces these young engineers to flex collaborative muslces and teamwork skills that may be rusty after a summer likely spent far from Shore classrooms.

Students begin by teaming up in randomly assigned pairs; each is provided with a simple wooden pegboard, a handful of nails, and an allotment of rubber bands. Their first task is to construct a mazelike path for a wooden ball, which must be able to roll through the maze unassisted, propelled by the force of gravity alone. However, the rules specify that the ball should travel as slowly as possible: teams must fill their boards with twists and turns, maximizing the amount of time it takes the ball to wind through. The team with the most glacial pace is deemed the "winner" of this round.

Next, teams must design another maze to stymie their classmates. McNall encourages the pairs of students to build deceptive pathways and dead-ends within their mazes, and to disguise the board itself with a top layer of rubber-band camouflage. The completed mazes are then passed around the iLab, and students and teachers all take their turn at coaxing a ball through each one, conquering the many obstacles classmates have dreamed up for each other.

Finally, all of the students' efforts are joined together as a single, nearly impossible maze secured to a 12-foot-long wooden spine. The entire class must work together to carefully lift the heavy monster-maze, using verbal cues to coordinate the tilting that will slowly send a ball from start to finish. Inevitably, patient requests to lift up or tip left give way to shouted demands and confusion, until students begin to understand how they must work together to reach the finish line.

Afterwards, McNall and the fifth grade faculty have the students reflect on their experience in the final cooperative activity. Students often use words that include "frustration" and "selflessness" to describe the challenge of trying to guide a ball through a 12-foot-long maze. According to McNall, this opportunity for the fifth graders to think about the ways they did and did not succeed at working with classmates may be the most valuable part of the exercise. "It's fascinating to see the students come to a realization about themselves through the team dynamic," says McNall. "For many, the instinct to raise their voices and try to control the ball single-handedly is strong, and there's usually a huge of amount of initial frustration."

But, McNall observes, what the students usually come to realize about collaboration is that quiet voices and a shared approach to a challenge are far more effective. For fifth graders, this is a valuable insight that will only gain in importance throughout their Shore career.