Marshmallow Game

I recently experienced the Marshmallow Game for the first time. It is an interesting game in which a few participants must work together to build a structure out of twenty pieces of spaghetti, a piece of string, and tape, on top of which must rest the marshmallow. It was an interesting experience that demonstrated the strengths of good cooperation, and for many others, demonstrates how easily bad cooperation can lead to disaster.


Luckily, my group’s structure stood successfully. We spent much of our time in the planning phase. More than half the time was spent discussing how best to make the structure stable with the marshmallow on top. Around the five-minute mark, I began to worry that we would run out of time without having actually built anything, so I decided to urge everyone to start building something. We hurriedly settled on a triangular shape, which was reinforced by taping three parallel spaghetti sticks together for each leg, and managed to finish the structure and top it with the marshmallow just in time. Surprisingly, we had the tallest structure in the room and won the game.


Through this experience, I learned that good communication is essential to collaborative efforts. I also learned that time management is essential as well, as we had difficulty getting past the design phase.