Cup Stack Challenge

The Cup Stack Challenge is a great task for students to practice working collaboratively and communicating productively in a team.

Materials: (per group)

• Task Cards
• 6 cups
• 1 rubber band
• Piece of string per member

The Rules:

1. ALL group members must participate for each challenge
2. Only the rubber band can touch or move the cups
3. If the directions for each challenge are not followed correctly, groups will have to restart that challenge
4. Have each challenge checked by me before continuing to the next challenge

To make the challenge a little bit more exiting, I use and adapted version the challenge cards originally created by Liz Larosa on middleschoolscience.com. Instead of just asking students to build a pyramid, they receive a series of challenges to work through at their own pace. Not only does this make the task a little more interesting, it made it so that all students were continuously working even if they were not the first ones to finish a task. The added directions also added a fun element that required students to communicate in non-verbal ways. Rather than giving the groups all challenges at once, I like to award them the next challenge once they can show me that they have complete each task. This allows me to build in more interaction with my students at the beginning of the year. 

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Actionable Norms

I use actionable norms (Work Persistently, Communicate Productively, and Take Risks) in my classroom and this task works out to be an awesome introduction to what these norms look like in practice. To help reinforce these norms, I walk around during the challenge providing positive feedback to groups in the form of a "stamp quiz". You can read more details about this strategy in my blog post on Actionable Norms.

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The Final Challenge

​I only use four challenges for the sake of time but the unofficial fifth challenge was to build a tower as tall as possible. I happily provide extra cups for any groups looking to take on the extra task. :)

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Files

Cup Stack Challenge (pdf)
File Size:	76 kb
File Type:	pdf

Download File

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Cup Stack Challenge (editable)
File Size:	44 kb
File Type:	pptx

Download File

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Other Introductory/Teambuilding Tasks

​For more tasks like this one that can be used at the beginning of the semester to highlight nature of science concepts and get students working in teams, check out the collection posted here.