Day 15 90 mins.

Objectives:
Students think about their own ability to balance finishing with time to think through the problems.

Bellwork: 10 mins.
What is more important: finishing efficiently or having the right answer?

Pregame: 40 mins.
Read part or all of the the following excerpt:

So it would be remiss for me to fail to mention my favorite part of your book: Procrastination can lead to originality. What do teachers do with this? What have you done with it in your classroom?

Look, let me confess. I am a precrastinator, not a procrastinator. That’s an actual term for someone who likes to dive into things as early as possible and finish them ahead of schedule. And I have always worn this like a badge of honor. I finished my doctoral dissertation two years before it was due. I wrapped up my undergrad college thesis four months before the deadline. And I thought this was a great way to be productive.
And then I found that precrastination is a virtue for productivity, but it’s kind of a vice for creativity. I had a student who did all this research in a bunch of companies showing that precrastinators like me, who did everything early, were less creative than people who procrastinated, as rated by their bosses.
And then we followed up and did some experiments where we randomly assigned people to procrastinate, which is a fun task. After a lot of follow up research, what we discovered was great originality comes from being quick to start but slow to finish. That when you dive right into a task, you close yourself off to incubation. If you finish early, you’re stuck only with your most conventional ideas, your first ones. You never have time to think outside the box.
You also tend to think much more in linear, structured ways, as opposed to making these random connections and unexpected leaps that you do when you’re putting off the completion of a task. So the lesson here is that you want to give students time to let ideas marinate.
So when you’re working on a creative project, having a due date that’s a couple of hours later isn’t always the best way to go. And that sometimes what you can do is you can assign a task. You can have them work on it. And then you can extend the deadline and say I want you to go back to the drawing board and consider all those unexpected ideas that you just didn’t have time to look at before.
And then there’s an opportunity to open up a little more original thinking than they had before, but of course, if they procrastinate to the last minute, they’re not going to be creative either because then they just have to rush to panic to do the first ideas as opposed to the most novel ideas.
From: http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/03/14/what-kind-of-group-work-encourages-the-most-original-thinking/
Discuss how during the game you have precrastinated or procrastinated.
Discuss who will do each task that was read yesterday at the end of the class.

Game: 30 mins.
Set game timer and click “End Day” on your website.
Let people start to negotiate.

Conclusion: (10 mins.)
Have students answer the question below and then share your answers.
Now that you know you can solve many of the world’s real problems, what problems would you like to solve in the real world?

 Further Reading
https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/drug-trafficking/
https://www.fws.gov/endangered/