My Favorite Team Building Puzzle

This week, I re-entered the classroom to teach 3 sections of biology. While this post will not talk about the circumstances leading to this shift, I do think it's important to note that it was complete my idea and I am super excited that I have this opportunity. It feels like the most poetic way to end my time in K-12 and am excited to share my experience as I round out this school year.

This week, I started all of my classes with my favorite team-building puzzle. When I used this activity as a math teacher, it was originally framed as the wolf, goat, and cabbage problem. 
From Wikipedia:
"Once upon a time a farmer went to a market and purchased a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage. On his way home, the farmer came to the bank of a river and rented a boat. But crossing the river by boat, the farmer could carry only himself and a single one of his purchases: the wolf, the goat, or the cabbage.
If left unattended together, the wolf would eat the goat, or the goat would eat the cabbage.
The farmer's challenge was to carry himself and his purchases to the far bank of the river, leaving each purchase intact. How did he do it?"
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When I taught math before, I simply presented this problem to students and suggested they use arbitrary objects around them to act the story out. I didn't have the resource to buy goats, wolves, or cabbages and had never thought to do so, especially since I didn't think my 11th and 12th grade students would take it seriously if they had toys on their desks for the first day of school. This time around, I knew I would be presenting the problem to 9th grade students and the idea of talking about wolves, goats, and cabbages seemed pretty.... boring and outdated. I knew it was a good puzzle and I wanted to use physical manipulatives to increase engagement, but I also knew it wasn't the best I could come up with and kept thinking about how to make it better. Then, while playing with my kiddo before bedtime I had an epiphany. 
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The next morning, I gathered my kiddo's toy dinosaurs, plastic trees, and Duplo figurines. I hot-glued popsicle stick rafts together and packed them all in my bag for school. Feeling concerned, my kiddo asked "Mommy, what are you doing with my toys?" I promised him that they would have a great adventure and I would take videos and share when I got home. With great hesitation, he agreed and I was on my way for my first day of teaching.

with To modify the problem, I changed the characters in the story to be more relevant (and fun). We were on a unit about evolution and learning about cladograms, which are diagrams that show the relationship between organisms - kind of like a family tree but for species. I decided that we would feature our story on carnivores, herbivores, and prehistoric trees. My explanation went something like this - 
"So, you have a carnivore, an herbivore, and a prehistoric tree with you in the jungle. You come to a river with a raft and you need to cross the river with all of your creatures. The problem is, you can only take one creature with you at a time. If you leave the carnivore with the herbivore, it will eat it. If you leave the herbivore with the tree, it will eat it. How can you get everything across without anything getting eaten?" I would then act this out with a duplo character, some dinosaurs, a tree, and a popsicle stick raft. 

Obviously, the students had great questions to which I had to come up with quick answers. "Why doesn't the carnivore eat the person?" - the person is like Owen Grady and can control the carnivore, but only when they are around it. "Can two creatures go on the raft together and the person stays behind?" - Nope. The students proceeded to act out the story with the toys. I recorded solutions with the students on my phone to share with my son. When the group presented a solution that didn't work, I would eagerly take up the dinosaurs and say "nom nom nom nom" while pretending to chomp the creature left behind to get eaten (the herbivore by the carnivore, the tree by the herbivore). It was incredibly fun and so satisfying to see students playing with toys while learning. Many shared their solutions while narrating the story with lines like "So Ironman is going to then take this T-Rex across" and "Then Captain America takes this fool so he doesn't get eaten by the Raptor." The combination of puzzle-solving, play, and storytelling was fantastic.

Thankfully, all of my kiddo's toys made it home safe and sound. There was a moment when Elsa, Anna, and Batman went missing and I was worried about what I was going to do to make it up to my kiddo. The next morning, I looked in the lab and found all three of them on a window sill, gazing at the park across the street. It was the perfect image to capture the beauty, joy, and peace I feel about this end to my journey in K-12. It is also a great reminder of the importance of play in learning and inspiration for me to take this wherever I go.