This one’s a group activity. I just ran this challenge in my class the other day. After putting them into groups of three, I gave them the following directions:

GOAL: For your group to get as many paper airplanes over the finish line (~10 feet away) as possible.
RESOURCES: 10 sheets of paper. Your own ingenious minds. 
RULES: You can’t physically cross the start line, which we will assume extends around the planet, like the goal line in football. 
Take 10 minutes for planning & making. 

Other than that, I offered no guidance. When they asked me questions—Can we do this? Can we do that?—I referred them back to the directions: What do the rules say about that?

As you might expect, most groups folded ten sheets of paper into ten conventional airplanes and attempted to sail them across the finish line. In my first class, the leading group flew 11 planes across the finish line (because they had torn their sheets of paper in half and made 20 planes). Then we moved onto the debrief, which is where this challenge becomes interesting.

Debrief: How much time did you spend on planning? On making?
Take another look at the rules. What assumptions did you make?

Most groups had spent almost no time planning. They jumped right into folding the sheets of paper into planes without thinking about alternatives.

They also made a bunch of assumptions that weren’t encoded into the directions. For instance, they assumed the planes had to fly across the line—but the directions say nothing about flying. They also assumed that planes had to look a certain way.

Then we moved onto round two, with the following directions:

Round Two:

Try again. Question your assumptions. Practice divergent thinking. Be wily (which is what I say because I can’t say “think outside the box” without rolling my eyes). Oh, and one more rule: You can’t repeat or replicate an approach that was already done in the first round (by any team).

10 minutes for planning and making. Grab 10 fresh sheets of paper. GO.

I won’t reveal the approach taken by the winning team (practice your own wiliness, you voyeur) but I will tell you the high mark went up from 11 to…740.

One final thing: As the class cleaned up the planes, I asked each group to tell us one thing they learned that day. If this challenge was just an hour o’ fun, it wouldn’t be worth much. But if they could make it a lesson about creativity that could translate to other challenges, it could be worth a lot. Oh, and the lessons couldn’t be a clichè (Think outside the box!) or something they already knew before the start of class.

That’s it. Feel free to steal & adapt this challenge for your own setting. If you do, drop me a line (and maybe a picture!) to let me know how it went, all right?

This challenge was adapted from an exercise found here.