The red cup challenge

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We had a professional day at work on the Friday of President's Day weekend. I hate those. Thankfully it was a half day. When I saw the agenda I was even more pissed off because it involved an obstacle course, a cup stacking challenge, and some other kind of puzzle thing. I was like "seriously? I have to get out of bed for THIS?" The 3rd thing I did that day was the cup stacking challenge. We got into groups of 5. We had 10 red Solo cups (Hi Toby Keith! @FourWalls ) and a rubber band attached to 5 2-foot pieces of twine tied to a large rubber band. We had to do a few different things to get the cups into like a straight line, create a pyramid with them, and make the tallest tower we could. We had to pull the strings to open up the rubber band to get it around the cup and then work together to place it where we wanted it. We were not allowed to use our hands. Even if the cups fell over we had to get them upright again using just the rubber band. The whole point of that PD day was to show how to use these types of activities to encourage and develop critical thinking. That is one area where our students are currently failing according to standardized test scores. The supervisor said that we were welcome to use the supplies with our students. Today I had nothing to do with one of the forensic science classes since they were a day ahead of the other class. (that makes me crazy) So I got the cups and rubber bands from the supervisor. I found 6 challenges online for this activity. The students would have been perfectly happy sitting in class doing nothing and being on their phones. Nope! For the most part they had fun trying to get the cups in the various formations. So that was the amazing lesson the forensic science class had today. If you want to see how to actually do it check out this video at like the 2 minute mark.