Durham General Chat: The rest got ate

Lucky. I once had to play with lego as part of an assessment centre team building exercise. My hands were so sweaty that I couldn't even play with it correctly! Not my finest couple of days.

Hi mockel!

That sounds like a terrible assessment centre task. What did it entail?
Today I built a castle and a cow.

What were the approximate dimensions of the castle?

The task was a little more involved in just making something out of lego, admittedly. Two groups of 6 were formed and placed in separate rooms with a box of lego and set of instructions. Each group was required to build a (fairly) stable bridge but they had to be identical. This was to be done by use of x number of conference calls and y number of face-to-face meetings (I forget the exact numbers, but it was possibly 3 of each) to propose and decide upon designs. The catch was that the two sets of lego and instructions were different. With regard to the lego, this meant the number of 2x4 blocks (say) were not the same, or there would be different numbers of each of the colours etc. As for the instructions, one set might say the height had to be at least 30cm, while the length had to be at least 60cm. The assessors also decided to throw in an added condition half way through to see how we'd react. For example, blocks having to be built with alternating colours.
In the end a small test was carried out to see if the bridges could take sufficient weight. I think both did ok, but they didn't look very alike. It was all good fun really.

P.S. Hi!

That sounds insanely detailed and hardcore. I like to just play with lego.
The castle was not very big, it was about 5cm wide x 15cm long x 7cm high - there was not very much lego to go round, I thought I should let the kids have most of it. They built people and guns mostly.

Playing with lego and plastercine and climbing on climbing frames for a job ftw!

Yeah, it lasted about 2 hours in total and was at the end of an intense two days of being closely watched in a variety of individual and group tasks. I'm so glad I don't have to do ACs anymore.

Kids are cool. Are you gonna have some? lol

"Please rate some other members before rating this member again."

I take back my earlier annoyance at college.

What's happened that is good?

At the moment I am at the stage when they are much cooler when you can leave them at 2.45pm and at weekends

Also, childbirth horrifies me.

What do they call you in class?

What seat shall I take?

Bit off-topic but I see you're doing a PGCE in maths after an economics degree. I thought there was a rule that you had to do 50% of your degree in the subject you wanted to teach? I was thinking about applying for teach first but I won't have 50% of my modules in a NC subject, but after seeing your sig I'm guessing there are exceptions for teaching in general?

Housemate has insisted I put his nationality down as "Londoner" on the Census

Remember to state your religion as Jedi...