New Class New Ideas

Today I had my first Strategic  Information Systems class. This is a class I have taught for the last many semesters. Normally after introductions we would go and dive straight into the course by defining strategy and having discussions in regards to strategy. I have been trying to ensure that I change my classes a bit. To be more a facilitator than I am a lecturer. Today I decided to have then do a little exercise that sometimes you might find in the corporate world. The students that I was teaching were third year students. I gave them the Think Outside The Box game to solve.

It took a couple minutes before I got any sort of response. No one had a clue, I therefore asked them to discuss with each other to find out if they could get any possible solution. After a couple of minutes, they were still getting nowhere. A clue was given that the lines did not need to stay inside the imaginary box that they had created round the 9 dots. We were finally getting somewhere. We finally came to a consensus that I should show them how it is solved. Before I did that though, I had to find out what strategy they had used and hence the start of a lesson. All in all I used an unconventional tool to teach and it worked. For anyone interested in the solutions find them below.