CEEPS On-Line Activity Database

Thumbs and Aircraft

Description

Two simple activities that explore assumptions.

Instructions

This page describes two different activities: Thumb Wrestling and Paper Aircraft

Thumb Wrestling

Get people to partner up and say that we're going to have a thumb-wrestling challenge.  With a partner, show them what you mean visually: hook the 4 fingers of both right (or left) hands with thumbs facing one another - one thumb holding a partner's down for 1 second equals a pin.  Tell the teams to get as many pins as possible in 30 seconds.  After 30 seconds, survey the group and ask what scores people got.

The majority of the group will go ultra-competitive and get very few pins.  Not that competition is bad, but if the objective was to get as many pins as possible there may have been other really creative ways to achieve this such as taking turns pinning one another or even letting one person pin the other over and over.

Setup a start line (perhaps with tape or rope), and announce the task to the group:

"Create a paper aircraft that will travel the farthest distance using only one sheet of 8.5 x 11 paper.  The distance is measured perpendicular from this start line."

Be sure to use the word "aircraft", not "airplane".  When asked questions, repeat instructions.

Give the group a minute or so to complete the task and then compare the results.

As above, the majority of the group will be folding and flying paper airplanes.  There is nothing wrong with that, but if the objective was distance, then crumpling the sheet into a tight ball and throwing it would work better - and it’s still an aircraft!

Facilitator Notes

It is very important to keep in mind that you are not trying to trick the group.  (Don't put their trust in you at stake here!)  They are not wrong with what they did.  You are simply trying to get the group to challenge their mindset around what assumptions we all make on a daily basis.  There is no right or wrong way to achieve the objective in thumb wrestling or interpret the meaning of the word "aircraft".  But there are sometimes possibilities for different outcomes within the same working parameters.

The potential learning here is not that there's a secret trick to life that we should be looking for.  However you can easily take these discussions into what other assumptions the group might be making in their real life challenges.

http://ceeps.ca/activities/Thumbs.htm