Peach Plains Revisited - Design Thinking and a Jar Full of Skittles

My math education class visited Peach Plains Elementary one more time before the semester ended to work with the kids in design thinking. We arrived at around 2:00 at the elementary school and broke the class into our two groups from before, with half of the GVSU students working with first graders and the other half, including myself, working with the fourth graders from our previous visit. Upon entering the room from before, the kids we had worked with seemed excited with the prospect of working with us again. In order to make sure that we got to work more quickly, we sent the prospective teachers to work with the same group as last time. In hindsight, I can't really tell if that was the best decision, as some groups reported less focus on the activity. In our group, the kids were laser-focused on uncovering my partner's age (which was not the purpose of the activity).

Anyways, after reuniting with our kids from last time, we began with a short activity that would get their minds up and running. This activity was functionally a little improv session, with the main body of the activity being creativity and the use of "yes, and..." We started with a prompt like "We are going on vacation," and the group would start by saying "Yes, and," after which they would add their own additional information to the story. Someone might add an activity that we did on the vacation or a location that we went to or maybe even something that happened on the trip. Our story ended up travelling many different places, developing a somewhat complex story to try and get all of the kids to brainstorm new ideas, brainstorming being the main purpose of the activity.

After this short period of improv, we then dove into the main activity for the day: a three-act problem that would introduce the problem that we were trying to solve as a group. Our specific problem was one involving a jar of Skittles and attempting to figure out how many Skittles or fun-sized packets of Skittles went into the jar. The video can be found here. Our main goal was to see if the kids could come up with various methods to try and solve the proposed problem. An issue with this is that the problem prevented one possible way, which was counting how many packets were put into the jar. The video was sped up to prevent people from getting an accurate read of how many packets were used. From there, we had kids attempt to predict how many Skittles would fit in a single row and then predict how many rows of Skittles would fill the jar. We also had a few educated guesses on how many packets would fit in the jar. Ultimately, we did have some variation in the methods the kids used, but not as much as we had hoped, but that may not have been due to a lack of creativity on the kids' part.

According to the information provided on the web page, we were able to tell the kids how many Skittles were in the jar, and a few different groups had projections that were pretty close, but none were exact. After revealing the answer, I went up to the front of the class to get the kids' opinions on why the answer might have been different than what they had predicted. Some kids had some really good input, such as there being a different number of Skittles in each fun-sized packet of Skittles.

Personally, I really enjoyed working with the students at Peach Plains Elementary. In the fourth grade class, everyone seemed really excited to get to work on the problem and figure out their own version of the answer. One girl in our group taught herself how to use long division with double digits, something that hadn't been taught in class yet. I was quite impressed and her teacher was as well. All of the kids clearly brought their best to the table and it really showed.