The Spaghetti Marshmallow Challenge is designed to get student chefs working together to build and test their recipes with an emphasis on radical collaboration (non-defensive communication), test and iterate (make it, try it, evaluate it honestly), and bias to action (less planning, more doing).
Keyword Team-Building Exercise
Equipment
20 sticks of dry spaghetti
one yard of string
one yard of tape
one marshmallow
measuring tape
Instructions
Set up the supplies for each team: 20 sticks of dry spaghetti, one yard of string, one yard of tape, one marshmallow
Explain that designing a menu is challenging; chefs try out things they like or they think look pretty on a plate, then get defensive when others don’t find it appealing. Sometimes, they find something with promise, but have a hard time finding a variation that works better: instead, they make the same thing over and over without ever changing the basic dish enough to make it actually BETTER.
Explain that before students start dreaming up menus, they and their team need to focus on the mindset necessary to engage in prototyping and testing. Each time you practice a possible recipe, it is a prototype. And each time you taste that recipe or have another student taste it, you are testing.
To practice these skills, here is what we will do: each team must build the tallest free-standing tower possible - that will support a marshmallow without breaking or falling over - in 18 minutes. They can only use the supplies they have on the table and nothing else.
Notes
Debrief:
What was the hardest part of this challenge? Easiest? What have you learned?
Why is testing so important? What would you do differently if you had the chance to rebuild the tower? Rebuilding your tower NOW would be iteration- a step all chefs responsible for a menu take.
To be a successful student chef competitor, you must be able to take feedback, see it as a gift, and use the feedback to better your menu - Take risks, be creative, try new things, etc. This is RADICAL COLLABORATION
Many people spend most of their time day-dreaming and planning what they would like to cook and very little time actually COOKING. When you work this way, you risk discovering that your competition dish won’t work too late to make needed changes.