9th of June: welcome to the project!

It was a full first day! The hosting team introduced us the schedule of the project and we went on with playing name games. Romanian team organized everyone into cleaning teams and then we all agreed to some ground rules. Then the Greek team set teams for the blog and social committee. After the directions of the Portuguese team, everyone chose a person from for the secret friend game. After we started the gossip box game. For lunch, we had delicious chicken with potatoes and ice cream. Later, Spain organized the spaghetti game and every team made the tallest tower they could make out of the materials they were given (longer explanation down). The competition was high but all of the teams did great and we had fun! Then the Greek team organized a team building game with tasks that the teams they divided had to complete. (see the pictures). Then Estonian team gave materials to make individual diaries for this project. Then finally it was dinner time and we had pasta and muffins! After that, it was free time, time to socialize. 

NOW DETAILED SPAGHETTI GAME:

Imagine a room filled with 30 people, divided into six teams. The task is simple: in fifteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 1x1 meter paper, one meter of tape, 20 cm of string, an empty can of beer, a plastic cup and 2 pens. It’s a great way to teach the benefits of rapid prototyping. Surprising lessons emerge when you compare teams’ performance. Who tends to do the worst? Why? Who tends to do the best? Why? What improves performance? What kills it? What we noticed was that teams that performed the best were the ones that didn’t sit around talking about the problem. They just started building to determine what works and what doesn’t. If something didn't work, they discarded it and tried another method (oh, and having an architecture student as a teammate might help too).

Lessons learned: Building develops your intuitions about how the process and materials are connected. You learn by doing, discovering problems you can’t predict in advance. Simultaneous attempts allows you to see a lot of good ideas. Being first to finish isn’t always the best. Multiple ways of trying to solve a problem usually beat a commitment to making your first idea work. All projects have resource constraints: exercises like this illustrate the value of deadlines. Encourage wild ideas: What if I tied the structure to the ceiling?

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