Expeditionaries Day 6 of 8: Eat poop, you cat! (You read that correctly)
Yes, you read the title of this blog post correctly.
"Eat poop, you cat!" is the title of a wonderful, simple, silly game.
Someone writes a phrase or sentence at the top of a blank piece of paper. The next person reads it, then folds it down so that no one else can see it, and draws a picture of that phrase (no words or numbers) before passing the paper to the next player. That next person looks at the drawing, then folds it down so that no one else can see the drawing, and proceeds to write the phrase or sentence represented by the image.
As you can see from the picture at the top, that is how "Here Comes the Sun" ends up as "Oh no, it's a bomb!" (Or how some other sentence ended up as "Eat poop, you cat!")
You might be wondering what any of this has to do with Day 6 of Expeditionaries, a social entrepreneurship learning experience.
We define social entrepreneurship as "creative and collaborative problem solving for the common good." When an experience is 100% team based, it makes good sense to begin by generating fun, trust, laughter, and lateral thinking--all of which are byproducts of "Eat poop, you cats!" and other warm up exercises we do in Expeditionaries.
On Day 6 of Expeditionaries, each team must hustle to iterate on its prototype solution. They have only two days left to get as much feedback as possible before their pitches to a CEO panel on Day 8. When each team member knows her team has her back and has been honing its lateral thinking skills to provide helpful, creative feedback, she experiences the challenge as "productive stress."
As one Expeditonary from Fordham Prep put it, "We laughed and we were able to get our work done. When I woke up today, I wanted to be here."
Under those kinds of conditions, in which students can accomplish more than we think they can, a game like "Eat poop, you cat!" starts to make a lot more sense.
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Stay tuned for Expeditionaries Day 7 of 8: What if bad ideas lead to good ideas?
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