4 C's February, Day 12 - Samantha Greenstein

This month, we focus on the 4 C's: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking. Today's entry comes from Samantha Greenstein, science teacher at Earl Warren Middle School:


In any science class, the 4 Cs are essential. An increasingly important part of any science classroom is that students develop engineering skills that will better enable them to take on the challenges that they will face in our world. In the Next Generation Science Standards, students are expected to define problems and design solutions.

In my 8th grade science class, I work to make sure that students are practicing the 4 Cs by having them work like engineers. One project we had students do this year was to build a Spaghetti Tower using the following supplies:



The constraints were:

• 10 minutes to plan
• 15 minutes to build
• Marshmallow must be at the top of the structure
• Tower must stand upright for at least 10 seconds

Students practiced the 4 Cs in the following ways:

Communication: Students had 10 minutes to plan their design (2 minutes silently, 2 minutes of sharing, and 6 minutes to create a group plan). It is essential that students understand how to communicate like scientists so that they can best share their ideas and learn from the ideas of others. We encouraged students to use the following sentence starters when sharing their ideas and when listening to others (we also practiced these sentence starters in a different activity before this):



Creativity: Students were limited on supplies, but they had an infinite number of building options. Students needed to come up with innovative solutions in order to make a structure that could actually hold the marshmallow. Innovation is the key to progress!

Collaboration: After the initial build, students were able to look at the other towers that were created around the room and then were allowed an opportunity to rebuild their tower. By talking to other groups about how they went about solving the problem, every student worked collaboratively to try different options and then to create the greatest possible solution.

Critical Thinking: Throughout this entire activity, students needed to overcome obstacles (broken spaghetti, leaning towers, disagreements in their group, etc.) by thinking critically about what the problem was and how they could find a solution.

Engineering challenges give students the opportunity to practice the essential 4 Cs.