Can You Build the Tallest Tower?
- September 8, 2020
What if you were asked to build the tallest tower? What would you use to achieve this?
This was a question posed to the Year 5 students, as part of their Humanities & Social Sciences unit of study in Business and Economics. It led to much deliberation and creativity.
The Challenge
The girls were asked to complete a group challenge. It involved building the tallest tower. They couldn’t just use the resources they wanted to. They had to use what was available – spaghetti sticks and marshmallows. But this came at a price! Each group had to purchase the resources as a producer/consumer from their teacher at a cost.
The Difficulty
The difficultly in this challenge is that not all groups were allocated the same budget to make their purchases, meaning they had different, and in some cases, a limited supply of spaghetti and marshmallows to be able to construct their tower.
The challenge tied in their knowledge of economic terms and connected their learning to life with their understanding of imbalances and scarcity of resources.
Here is what a few of the girls had to say:
“I thought this activity was fun and a good way to learn about scarcity” Annabelle Debenham
“It was a good way to learn how to spend your money wisely when buying the resources. We discovered at the end of the challenge that the groups with the most resources weren’t able to construct the tallest tower even though they had the most money to spend” Aliesha Goldsworthy
“Our group had the least amount of money in our budget and it proved that we had to be careful, creative, and resilient when choosing what and how much to buy to make the tower. It surprised me that our group didn’t come last even though we had the least amount of capital resource” Hayley Kayser
- ConnectingLearning2Life
Author: Santa Maria College
Santa Maria College is a vibrant girls school with a growing local presence and reputation. Our Mission is to educate young Mercy women who act with courage and compassion to enrich our world. Santa Maria College is located in Attadale in Western Australia, 16 km from the Perth CBD. We offer a Catholic education for girls in Years 5 – 12 and have 1300 students, including 152 boarders.