mindstorms part 1

I’m going to start with what we did, and then get into the whys and wherefores and implications after. Oh, and the methods!

The Friday group challenge was very much a Taskmaster inspired affair.

The task: reproduce the image you’ve been shown using a text-to-image generative AI.

One person in each of your groups has been chosen to be The Speaker.
You must choose one person from your group to be the AI Operator. Once they have been chosen, they must leave the room.
The remaining people in your group are the Gesturers.

Speakers, you will now be shown the image. Take in every detail.

Speakers, you now have 3 minutes to describe the image to the Gesturers. You can talk, and they can ask questions.

Once the rubber chicken squawks, all talking stops. From that point, the Gesturers must communicate silently.

AI Operators, welcome back! Your team’s Gesturers will now silently guide you to recreate the image using AI. No talking allowed!

You have 10 minutes to generate the image. Your time starts… Now!

Ohhhh, but did we have fun!!! 100% participation and engagement in the class. And when we finished, they said, can we do it again? Before round 2, we had a quick debrief, and ironed out some kinks. This was just glorious!

The whys and the wherefores:

I arrange my students in groups fairly early on. I mix them up each day for the first few days, while I get a sense of them and how they relate to each other, and then I begin the social engineering in earnest. At the beginning of this past week, I hadn’t got enough information to put them in their first semi-permanent groups, so I just did a random distribution, knowing, and letting them know, it would just be for this week.

While it was clear that the social fate my hand had dealt put a couple of groups at a clear disadvantage- one, where all but one of the students had only one or two years out of ESL section classes, and were also temperamentally shy- none of the groups seemed to be able to function together for even the most basic tasks.

So, I designed the Friday group challenge to force them to be interdependent.

I chose the speakers for each group, and I chose the students who had been reluctant to talk with others in the class because of ESL stuff. I went around to each of them quietly when I gave them the “speaker” tag and assured them that they would only be speaking with their group, and not in front of the class.

I was really hoping that the magic would happen when the speakers would talk with the gesturers, that the gesturers would want so much to succeed in the task that they would ask for clarifications, help provide words that might be lacking, etc. Given the results, I can only conclude that this magic did, in fact, happen.

You wanna see the results?

This was the first image they were asked to reproduce: