Thanks to Tom Wujec’s Marshmallow Challenge, you’ll find lots of examples online of people who have experimented with it in various settings whether at school or at work. (See some of the links below). It’s a powerful technique for learning and working as a team.
In the spirit of agile and allowing teams to inspect and adapt I’ve recently facilitated such a workshop at work where we had groups running the challenge in 2 sprints of 10 min. each. In each sprint, we had a fast paced version of a couple of minutes of the typical Scrum ceremonies: Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospectives.
It’s an excellent learning process where teams saw the value of iterating and learning from failure. For example, in the 2-minute retrospective at the end of the first sprint, teams were able to step back and reflect on what they have done so far and adapt to how they can improve in the next 10-minute sprint. As a facilitator you can use the retro as one of the talking points in the debrief at the end – for example, what impact did it have on their second sprint.
Some Links:
- https://dschool.stanford.edu/groups/k12/wiki/c6410/Spaghetti__Marshmallow_Exercise.html has some good debrief questions at the end.
- https://lenbrzozowski.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/the-marshmallow-challenge/ has an easy setup guide.
- http://bridgemiddle.blogspot.ca/search/label/Wujek shows how it was applied within a faculty at a middle school.