Today’s challenge was to build a tower using sticks and twigs. I specified the maximum length of  a stick – about 1m- and simply said they could use any method they liked to build the tallest tower they could. After about half an hour we toured each group to discuss what made each design strong / what could improve it. The children then had another 10-ish minutes to make improvements and in some cases to start again.

In the end the children said, with some encouragement (!) that they had learned to solve and overcome a problem and to be resilient. We are very big on resilience just now. Everyone agreed that they had improved their design as they went along and understood how they could do a much better job next time. I was very impressed by the way the children coped with failure – several of the initial designs simply fell down. Next week I will challenge them to build something different and I am very confident that they will have learned from their work today.