The towers that Andy built...

TED is devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading that started out as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. As a Design software company, we have a relationship with TED. I first blogged about Autodesk Fellow, Tom Wujec's, marshmallow challenge in October of 2010. The marshmallow challenge is an exercise to see how people organize and work together to accomplish a shared task — in this case, constructing as tall a tower as possible that still supports a marshmallow. Groups of CEOs sometimes find the exercise troubling. Small children find it a breeze. Tom presented his findings at TED.

Since his TED talk, Tom often receives letters from people who share their experiences with the marshmallow challenge. So I was thrilled when I read a letter that Tom shared with us the other day. In the tradition of This is the house that Jack built...

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Hi Tom,

I've been having fun creating marshmallow towers using the constraints, except that I planned these on paper before I built them.

• I was able to build a 40 inch tower in under 17 minutes.

  

• I built two 47 inch towers, but they took almost an hour each.

  

• I built a 37 inch Eiffel looking tower that was pretty flimsy. The real Eiffel tower is built of triangles.

  

• I built a tower of all triangles that was very sturdy, but only 34 inches tall because 6 spaghetti sticks were used at each level.

  

• I also built a very sturdy 37 inch tower. Here it is next to the 34, 40, and 47 inch towers.

  

I also built a lot of towers that fell down. I'm all done for now, because I ran out of ideas and ate all the marshmallows. Thanks for the challenge idea, and have fun looking at the attached pictures.

Andy

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Thanks Tom. Thanks Andy.

The towers of marshmallows are alive in the lab.