When it comes to incentivizing kids to do something, few things work better than candy.
In this story, a teacher offers candy to the winners of games to motivate them to learn to play as well as possible.
But sometimes, the kids can outsmart the teacher and game the system, as you will see below.
Let’s take a look:
Do you want to win or share more candy?
I was reminiscing about this and wanted to share it.
Not sure it’s really malicious compliance but I’m still proud of this.
Exposing kids to a variety of fun and useful activities sounds like a great club for a school.
One year in elementary school we rotated little club like studies, one quarter you’d learn about computers, another, in this case, was chess & checkers.
Once the kids learn the rules, I’m sure they are motivated by the promise of candy.
After learning the basics we had to hold a point based tournament and the winners would get a bag of candy.
If there is one thing kids love more than the chance of getting candy, its being certain of getting it!
One half did checkers, the other chess, and if there’s a tie both winners would get a bag.
Cue our 8 year old candy hungry brains.
These are some clever kids!
We kept close track of the scores, played to win almost until the end, then we checked the score and let the person win that needed to for the points.
End result: everyone had the exact same score and we each got some candy
It seems that commenters on Reddit agree that both the students, and the teacher, were very smart.
Let’s take a look.
These kids learned something very valuable that day.
It makes you wonder if the teachers planned this out to see if the kids would work together.
With kids, sometimes the trick to getting them to learn is to keep them from realizing they are being taught.
Whether the teachers planned it this way or not, this is a very wholesome story.
Sometimes it is the unexpected lessons that are the most valuable.
If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.