At the beginning of class, Garrett explained to the students what acronyms are. The students learned each other's names by playing a name game. Then, the students lined up in order of their birthday. Garrett paired them up and gave each team a computer. He talked to them about balance and then handed out Lego bricks to each team. They built structures according to a sheet of paper. They wrote down whether the structures stood or toppled. Garrett had them attempt to make a rule to predict the stability of the structures. They came up with the rule "If the base is under the middle, then it stands. If the base is not under the middle, then it topples."
After snack, the students attempted to disprove the rule by building more complex structures. They found a model that disproved the rule, so they entered it and other buildings on a graphing applet. There were two strange lines that intersected somewhere in the buildings. They tried to figure out what the lines were by building various structures. Each student told the class their hypothesis about what the lines represented. The lines represented the center of area. So, the final rule was "If the center of area was inside the base, the building will stand."
At the end of class, the teams competed to build a structure that would support the most units off the side of the table. The catch was that each team could only use 25 bricks. The winner managed to get 28 units to extend from the edge.