Marshmallows Are Heavier ThanYou Think!

The aim is to build the largest tower you can given 20 pieces of spaghetti, a yard of string, a yard of tape, and of course top it off with a marshmallow in 18 minutes.

It was a slow night, we ate out meaning no clean-up, I had time on my hands. I invited my husband to join me. Of course, the engineer in him couldn’t help himself. He was out to beat me. Very quickly, I had three small humans who all wanted to build their towers.

It isn’t as easy as it looks. Can a teacher do better? I walk into the challenge confident that I have every advantage over my kids. I’ve seen the Ted Talk, I’ve seen the challenge done, and I know a lot about triangles (more about that in a bit).

I begin through a backwards design, sticking the marshmallow on top of a single strand of spaghetti to see how much it could hold. It looks like a lot, but looks are deceiving as I soon found out.

I build a lattice of triangles lashed together with tape. Triangles of course are the strongest structure in engineering, and you see them from everything from cranes to bridges, so I feel pretty confident this is going to work.

Although my triangles are strong, the stupid spaghetti keeps breaking. This leads to so much sticky tape. I glance at my husband who is quietly working away. Inside a chuckle, his tower looks nothing like the pictures on the internet.

Then I check the time. It felt like I only just started. Over half of the time is gone already. Time to check my work. I lash together the single strand holding the marshmallow to my base, expecting it to hold. It doesn’t. It leans just enough to cause the entire thing to topple over.

It’s then I decided to get clever. I’m going to jack up the middle by pushing spaghetti down the centre of the structure. I’m so confident in my newfound brilliance that I lash more sticky tape to all sides. It holds. Eureka. I’m onto something now. I’m dealing with fractions of an inch now, so I cautiously raise the marshmallow a bit at a time, jacking up a corner here or there, until the timer reached zero. I’m pretty proud of my creation, but I can honestly say I did not do as well as some of my kids did. My husband this whole time was trying to create some balance pully system. Honestly, I don't know if he wanted to out do me or his crazy divergent engineer brain had a concept. However, his time management was worse than mine.

When the kids were told a tower and build it as high as you can, they didn't care. Maybe it was the time of night. My 3-yr-old ate her marshmallow and went back to bluey. My 10-year-old decided that he just needed lots of legs and that was enough to just make it stand. The 7-year-old copied the 10 -year-old and got angry when hers was smaller. However, explaining that eating the spaghetti is not part of the deal did not go down well.

Who won? ME!!! I don't think it was based on creativity or divergent thinking.

Here are some key takeaways from the experience:

• The marshmallow is more substantial than you think.

• Be prepared to adjust your expectations based on the reality of the experience.

• Time will run out sooner than you think.

• Having education on your side will certainly make the process easier.

• When time runs out and life is falling to bits, just sticky tape the shit out of it, and it will hold everything together until the main event is over.

These five key takeaways can be applied to many of life’s other challenges, and that’s what the great marshmallow challenger is all about - though a lot more fun and delicious in the end.