CAS Primary School Presentation UN Day

During our CAS meeting on Thursday 2nd October, my group and i had discussed about the first step to raising awareness within our school community.  Our ideas scattered between presentations, raising money and getting students to try a challenge that was related to what we do in the field when we travel to local routes in Sri Lanka. After having a brief discussion about what we should choose and which topic would be the most reliable we came up with the suggestion that we would combine both a visual presentation as well as interact with the students by getting them to do a fun activity.

The activity that we had come up with was known as the "Marshmellow Challenge" and it was one of the best ideas brought up in our meeting. This challenge had everything to do with Habitat for Humanities and what we stand for as a Service group. We are all about collaboration, thinking critically and constructing. The Marshmellow challenge allowed students in groups of 4 to collaborate with each other to finish the almost impossible task given to them. The rules of this challenge were that students were given a list of materials that they could use to construct a standing tower. They would only be able to use 20 sticks of spaghetti, 1 meter of tape, 1 meter of string and 1 marshmellow. With this list of materials they had to be able to create the tallest tower that stood without falling apart, rules said that the marshmellow had to be at the top of the tower and no where else.

On the 3rd of October, Overseas School UN Day we were given a time to go to the primary students classes and begin our presentation and activity. We created a powerpoint that would be simple and understandable. We essentially followed 3 questions of the powerpoint that would bring out our goals as a service group and educate the minds of the younger students who are yet to choose a service activity in the near future.  We covered questions such as; What do we do in Community & Service and why? What materials to we deal with when working in our field? How do we collaborate as a group?

These question were answered through visual and verbal communication, we would show them an image of the materials we use or deal with when we construct houses and then we elaborate on them by explaining why we used them and for what purpose. Our goal for this presentation was to not only be able to interact with students but to have them transfer what they know into real life situations. We had really good responses and questions from the primary students about our presentation. To conclude our presentation we had got all the students to work together in completing the Marshmellow Challenge. They were given 20 minutes to build the tallest tower and over that period of time we were able to see how much students really relied on each other and what they were thinking about because it's really all about planning and working according to the time. For primary school students we had well achieved our goal and interacted with the students well enough to know what they were interested in. The game had helped them understand what we do and how much work it takes just by working on their mini activity. We managed to gain more experience with presentation and figuring out solutions to raise awareness. It was an experience well worth our wild as leaders of Habitat for Humanities Service group.