Ready for today’s challenge? The Center for Growth and Innovation (CGI) is offering a course called Creative Problem Solving at ESF Episcopal this week, and it’s all about bringing real-world challenges into the classroom. Today’s morning challenge involved a plastic Solo cup, 50 pipe cleaners, and a box of one-inch nails.

CGI Instructor, Matt, challenged campers to create a pipe-cleaner base that would structurally hold one Solo cup and as many one-inch nails as possible. Using their best critical thinking and reasoning skills, campers experimented with wide pipe-cleaner bases to distribute the weight and narrow bases to focus the weight. The taller the base and the more nails the structure could hold, the more points each camper earned. One camper created a structure that was five and half inches tall and held 82 nails! This one was named the winner.