2021 talk:Discuss/The key assumptions

The Marshmallow Challenge highlights the importance of prototypes and gets teams actually starting to work, since beginning a project can sometimes be the hardest part of the design process. By realizing that the first idea doesn't need to be the right idea, a team can quickly brainstorm and test many solutions, whereas other teams may get stuck in ideation. Watching this TEDTalk helped my group and I lessen the burden of overthinking and come up with solutions based on research and testing.

I love your take on this discussion. Your first idea will not always be the right or most successful idea, so it's necessary to implement several solutions into your brainstorming.

I agree with your take on the Marshmallow Challenge, how it can be implemented into real life situations to give you a clearer head of the approach you take when thinking of a solution.

The speaker begins the lecture by discussing the Marshmallow Challenge and why adults found trouble making their structure stand. He explains that several people have to collaborate to form something in a short amount of time. Graduates of Kindergarten had better outcomes of this challenge because they started with the marshmallow and built different prototypes around it. When collaborating, it's important to note that you start with a marshmallow, and through interactions, you will gain a shared experience, common language, and prototyping & facilitation.

The video shows a great depiction of how prototyping your invention and solution can gear up a higher succes rate. It shares an interactive setting, a common language, and facilitates the key components of adjusting to the failures along the way. The higher the stakes, the higher the chance of failure due to the pressure of suceeding. Yet, realizing that to suceed you have to prototype your solution before it can finally succeed alongside your teamates is the main lesson from the Marshmellow Challenge.

Sometimes is better to start doing and then see what happens instead of planning so much and finally it turns up to be unsuccessful. If we prototype an idea and see how it goes so we can easily detect where we can do better

I believe that sometimes people should trust more on their instincts instead of thinking so much. Just like you said, it is better to prototype the idea and see what happens

I have applied the mantra of think big, start small, and iterate fast this past year. However, things are more prone to fail and cause a lot of lost both in time and monetary. I just knew the concept of prototyping to test how our idea works in a real situation. There's always a way to find a situation to mimic your goal. I think this is a great concept I would love to apply.

I agree. While planning can be helpful from time to time, we can often get caught up in the little details or get in our heads thinking about who we are around to impress. Getting out of your head, jumping in, and trusting your gut can ultimately surprise you. We work best when we allow ourselves creative freedom without our own restraints.

From the video we can see that the things which appear to be easier are tough than they look. Video enables us not to stick to one solution rather plan for many solutions for the given problem. The business students are more apprehensive than the kindergarten students because the business students plan one solution and they implement it but the kindergarten students started prototyping and bringing out many solutions. Prototyping is very important because it gives the demo of the project and if we have any suggestions regarding the project, we can easily develop it further by eliminating the errors and making the project a grand success.

In this video, we came to know that planning a prototype plays an important role in designing a project. Because each and every project has its problems and we have to analyse and design a prototype which overcomes the problems of that project. Definitely, it is necessary to design a prototype and should take feedback on it. Then, we have to start implementing the solutions in a creative way. Neither success nor failure is permanent. If we take success and failure in an objective way, we can think creatively and think out of the box.

I totally agree with you. The viability of an idea to be implemented can be known by prototyping it. Everything that is in our head cannot be implemented in reality. The next step to prototyping is testing, which makes the platter complete. Also, the thing that we can learn from kindergarten kids is to try various ways in which an idea can be prototyped rather than sticking to a predefined method. The variety in our prototype teaches us newer things and helps us uncover problems that were not identified before and this turns out to be a great learning!

There's a lot of benefits related to prototyping. It could reduce the costs we need to provide and could give us guidance on a lot of things that could slip our thoughts and the risks. We could gain some sort of ways to do prototyping rather than sticking to a predefined method. The feedbacks we got from testing our prototyping is so helpful that we could identify what could be improved right away. It's a great learning to help us innovate in something new!

This video is about the Marshmallow Challenge which  teaches many things. Making the tallest structures is a challenge where kindergarten kids win over graduates. This is because graduates are trained over certain plans and they only try to execute that way but coming to the kindergarten kids they try various plans and think out of the box without considering their failures. They came up with different new ideas.And the other reason is kindergarten kids don't spend time jockeying for power, that's when they go on working creatively and more effectively. Kids rebuild the prototypes many times and that becomes an advantage for them to win, whereas graduates go with the single plan. From this we can say that making prototypes is the most important step in building any product.

Hi Manvithabudda,

I agree very much with your response. I think for kids, they do not care whether they are right or wrong. They simply test to see if they are and it is in that that they try out so many different things together. They are simply curious. Older participants in the challenge, however, may have preconceived notions and intuitions about what is right and wrong and that creates unhealthy constraints for them because they may not think prototyping would be useful or takes up too much time. In addition, there's a bit of a power structure, I agree, that restricts collaboration and decisions made.

Thank you for sharing, Jackie

After viewing the TED talk, I remembered doing the Marshmallow challenge in school.  Once when I was younger, and once when I was older. My results were consistent with those mentioned in the video. When I was younger, I performed substantially better than when I was older. I believe that as we become older, we tend to strive to solve problems in certain ways rather than accepting that there is no perfect solution. Using this video to prototype will teach myself and others like me that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to every problem.

After watching this video about Marshmallow challenge, giving the same challenge for the kindergarten kid and the graduate. The kids have no plan but got good results where as the graduates could not succeed as they stuck to one plan and did not explore all the perspectives.

It is amazing how multidisciplinary teams can create magic while working together. In the past people used to think that we had to work individually, because we studied different things and the tasks weren’t the same, but now we can see how valuable a teams can become by working in the same direction.

I like your opinion because when we work in a team projects, some time we are afraid to ask something that we do not know or said our opinion for fear of looking bad. That fits me because we live in a very individualized world and that environment it is seen in all planes. So promote teamwork it is very important today: each members do their best, we learn to lose and win as a team and specially, we learn to think with empathy.

In the above video, we have understood the importance of team work. We could clearly see the productivity level increased after 4 months. There was certainly greater synergy produced and it lead to different ways of innovating. Also there was involvement of team members distributing the tasks as shown at 1:54 in the video. With respect to the time of 120 days of training enhanced the flexibility among the teammates due to which they were able to overcome obstacles and improve service rates, build trust, simplify conflict resolutions and gain fresh perspective to the problems everyday.

One of the takeaways I took from after watching the TedTalk when selecting a prototype from our group that we would continue with the process. Understanding the prototype better for an audience of students and working amongst a group of people from different colleges to get results brainstorming different ideas and conducting interviews with students to further help in the future.

The best part was the beauty of an untrained innovative thinker where the kindergarten students were continuously making a prototype and refining it and did not stick to one particular right plan. The team work also paid off and they were not doing it for any benefits of any kind. The kids just tried different possibilities on building the prototype and did not restrict their thinking on finding one right plan. The importance of prototype is clearly seen as it can be continuously refined before the final product is built.

I think this challenge teaches you that spending time thinking about a single solution and then implementing it is not the best option to reach an objective solution. The best option is to think of a prototype, test it and modify it in the process; the process is not part of the solution, it is the solution.And a very important point is that, as the video shows, it is best to try many possible solutions and not be prepared to do just one, which in the end possibly fails.

I agree Nicole, honestly before this program I didn't really prototype, because I didn't understand the importance of it. After, meeting with our UI guides I found that prototyping and researching for engagement is really important when trying to implement new things into the system.

Hello Chara, thank you for sharing your experience with me, it is nice to meet people who think the same. I hope to continue sharing experiences soon.

For me personally, it’s quite relatable how the 18 minute timeline is filled with introductions, tasks dividing, planning until eventually there’s only small amount of time left for implementation (where in the end it can an ouch rather than ta-da!). This has pretty much give me a brand new point of view, where before I don't really see ‘trial and error’ as a better solution than design thinking. I had always thought that we should first apply the steps of design thinking correctly before we actually going to try something. Apparently some situations -such as the marshmallow challenge with all the limitations- will be more effective if it is solved by creating prototypes and ideas without having to stick to the standard rules. Eventually, we all have to go back a bit and remember how to think openly and creatively as a child, where ideas and solutions that come up are not determined or restricted by anything (for example major in college or job position).

Prototyping just strips you down completely and beautifully. For any perfectionist out there, it will most likely physically hurt to make something that experimental. But the truth is that first prototypes should and will look like a bunch of papers, paper clips, and glue. The cool thing about that is, the effect it has on the people testing the prototype, who will try to imagine the real project coming to life. That's the AHA moment! That's where I've gotten the majority of my latent need and inference observations. Feelings are better shown than expressed... And that's when it will start making sense and feeling better, as the prototype will start solidifying and the cost and time invested will have been so much lower...

Yes indeed, instead of just thinking about it why don't we just try to do something about it right. Such an amazing quotes "Feelings are better shown than expressed" ahaha

YES! That quote is really impressing

I loved how the kindergartener's performed well on this marshmallow challenge by always keeping the marshmallow on top. There are so many times when trying to deal with big problems that we get too focused on defining the problem and not focused enough on testing out solutions. I think that this example helps to illustrate the fact that failure is usually a better teacher than theory. Going back to the basics of trial and error can inform you more about the topic at hand than abstract guessing ever will.

Yes, I find this interesting quote on the internet which was “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.” by Theodore Roosevelt and pretty much same as what we're learning right now. We can instead try and give more attention to focusing on the marshmallow (goals) rather than just focusing on defining the problem

As a perfectionist it was hard to think about prototyping because I want my first idea out there to be perfect and that isnt the truth for anything and this video was really making me think about that expectation that it will be perfect the first time. This weeks assignment has made me have to rethink and we have started to see some new ideas form and that has been amazing to see and feel.

I believe you can work on that pretty soon, it's not always have to be prototyping though. In some cases it's so much better to really think on it first before really prototype it, I mean as long as the time wasn't 18 minutes with a very limited resources you'll have much time right. As a quote from the internet (again) also said that always "Think Before you Act" ahaha

By the way best of luck on all of your (upcoming) final project guys !