Sticky Note Exercise

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“Sticky Note” Exercise
The purpose of this exercise is to help students develop a Project Task List. It will reinforce the process of brainstorming ideas, defining priorities and estimating time requirements.

1. Define student teams
Group students into teams of 3-6 each. (Larger groups will take longer than smaller ones to finish the exercise.) For the exercise, you can use any of the Example Projects or any other project. However, for the sake of simplicity, we recommend doing the process for the first time with a simple project, such as “Making a peanut butter & jelly sandwich”.

2. Generate ideas/brainstorm
Give each team member 10-12 sticky notes (3MTM Post-It® Notes or any other brand).
a. Working alone, each student writes onto a sticky note a very concise (10 word) description of a task that must be completed to finish the project. Each student should come up with 5 or 6 tasks, each written on a separate sticky note. (10 minutes)
b. Each team will need their own area of empty wall, white board, butcher paper, or other suitable space. Each team member sticks his or her sticky notes onto the wall. The students review each others’ tasks to make sure they understand them. Encourage everyone to follow the protocol of brainstorming (e.g., no criticizing of ideas). From this process, each team will likely come up with additional tasks to add to those on the wall. (10 minutes)

3. Organize ideas
Students collectively organize the tasks on the wall by placing the sticky notes of similar tasks next to each other. (They can remove any that are agreed by the team to be redundant or unnecessary.) The result of this activity is a set of tasks logically grouped and, if the team has brainstormed well, nearly all those necessary to complete the project (10 minutes)

4. Order tasks and identify dependencies
Each team decides on the order in which the tasks need to be completed. Which tasks depend on other tasks being completed?
The team member who has agreed to function as the recorder writes the tasks into the Project Task List form in the order of what needs to be done first. In addition, each team adds to the Project Task List an owner for each task and how the task will be completed. (15 minutes)

5. Take a picture of, or gather and scan, your sticky note creation from step 3. Post that picture / image file to your wiki.