I have to rate tinker toys and lego's as some of the best toys every made, I 
hate to think of the hours I've spent sprawled out on the floor building 
things with my children as they've grown up.  I was pleasantly surprise when 
one of the classroom exercises in my lesson plan called for tinker toys and 
lego's!
 
I was teaching a block of instruction on leadership and small group activity, 
the exercise was simple:  bring in a box of tinker toys or lego's for each 
group of 6-8 students, give them 20 minutes to construct a tower, the group 
with the highest tower "wins" -- what they win is up to you and dependent on 
the age of the class; my college juniors wanted cookies! ;)
 
Anyway, the real key behind this exercise is to watch how they attack the 
problem--who emerges as a group leader, do they go through a planning stage, 
how do the ideas come in, do they approach the task in an orderly manner, is 
everyone participating, if not-is anyone attending to the "non-participants", 
are there domineering personalities and if so what is their impact on the 
success of the group, who is handling the maintenance behaviors in the group, 
etc.  This can be used as a lead in to a lesson that covers these types of 
issues, or it can be used after the lesson is taught to see if the students 
comprehended the material and can apply it.
 
The neat thing about it is the students are so focused on the "fun" 
associated with playing with toys, that they don't consciously focus on some 
of the group leadership ideas -- this allows the instructor to make some very 
valuable observations.  Processing this one is fairly straight foward, you 
can use a variety of questions to have the students identify strengths, 
weaknesses, recommended improvement areas associated with how they approached 
the task.  I find this is a fun one to break up lecture/discussion on 
leadership and group dynamics.
 
Dale
 
dhill@badlands.nodak.edu
captain.scarlet@spectrumbbs.com
--- DB A3000sl/005017
---------------