Take It and Make It

This Wannabees activity focuses on sophomores and targets English language skills.

Participating students work in teams and use a bag of popular arts/crafts materials to create a miniature of an animate or inanimate ‘thing’ that would be found in the country, city, or suburbs. For example, using the materials they receive, students can build a cow, an automobile, or a miniature Statue of Liberty.

Student ‘creation’ teams select the object to be reproduced, construct a miniature of same, and then write a set of directions using only mathematical measurements, names of shapes, colors if necessary, and directions for putting pieces together. Creation teams will provide instructions for reproducing the object they built, but cannot use any language that actually describes the item.

The ‘reconstruction’ team must duplicate what the ‘creation’ team built originally without ever seeing the item. The reconstruction team will receive a bag of identical materials used by the creation team, and duplicate the item by only reading the directions provided by the creation teams. Points are awarded for difficulty levels involved in creating/reconstruction the item. 

The process emphasizes the need for strong reading and writing skills. Students ‘win’ the game if the reconstruction team can recreate the ‘thing’ made by the creation team using only the written directions.

Technical writing is an in-demand skill, but one that few students cultivate because most writing in school does not demand the level of skill that creates good technical writers. Teams compete — only one team wins. But all realize how very hard it is to write directions. That’s why people who are good technical writers make significant salaries.

The game winds up with a discussion about the law of supply and demand as it pertains to one’s proficiency in language and the search for available jobs.

Strengthen Your Core | Rounding the First Bend

Building a professional résumé and updating it every year (at least) is something that every job seeker needs to know how to do, especially in an economy that will likely not support decades in a single job. In fact, most workers will need to look for a new job about every three years. Those who work in the GIG Economy will have to revise and improve their résumés far more often — perhaps every three or four months. While the résumé as a single-page document recounting a person’s education and work experience may be morphing into a set of online essay questions that job applicants have to answer coherently, the content of the résumé provides answers to those individual online questions.

This will be the third consecutive year that participating students upgrade their résumés with our advice and instruction. These activities help them define their core competencies and set goals for improving same and help them narrow down their career choices.

Sophomores continue to learn how they can quantify their current and future academic and social performance with data so they can build a better story for the résumés they will need to write in senior year.