The Spaghetti Tower is a fun yet insightful exercise that encourages participants to build and experiment. Several teams of ideally four people compete against each other.
The task is to build a free-standing tower as high as possible within 15 minutes. The materials are:
An equal number of spaghetti and one marshmallow for each team (example: 30 spaghetti and six marshmallows). If necessary, you can expand this with tape, ribbons, scissors … However, the teams should always have the same materials.
The spaghetti tower is not only a warm-up, but can also provide assessments on the planning and implementation of the task based on the observations of the teams.
It can almost always be observed that team members quickly fall into a long planning process and use a relatively short time for implementation, where often only one model is created and then this model also often does not hold free-standing – and thus the task is not fulfilled.
Especially in Design Thinking (and also with small children who demonstrate it to us) it is important to test ideas directly, to try them out and to learn from them what works and what does not work. The message of this exercise is: testing and learning early is better than theorizing too long in advance.