Minute to Win It

Teen Read Week took place October 16-22, and to celebrate we had quite a bit going on at the library. One of my favorite programs from this week was the Minute to Win it event.

Have you ever seen this show? The idea is to challenge people to complete a series of seemingly simple tasks in less than 60 seconds. But it's a lot harder than it sounds! Even though it might seem easy to keep three balloons in the air at once or move a cookie from your forehead to your mouth without using your hands, these tasks all proved to be much more difficult than they first appeared.

Planning this program was surprisingly easy. I talked to a few librarian friends who had dome similar programs before to get ideas, which helped a lot. The official Minute to Win It website has a list of the challenges featured on the show, complete with rules, a list of what supplies would be needed, and video of the task. Then it was simply a matter of selecting eight games to try! There are lots of good choices, but in the end we selected:

A Bit Dicey
Bobblehead
Defying Gravity
Egg Tower
Face the Cookie
Hang Over
Spin Doctor
Stack Attack

Attendance was kind of low (we're still working on building a solid teen base group at my library) so I was able to run the entire program on my own. But with more than four teens I would definitely suggest having another staff person or volunteer help out so that the teens can split into groups, allowing more teens can play at once. I kept the time for each challenge with a stop watch while the teens tried each task - sometimes more than once. We tracked who was able to successfully able to complete each task, and awarded the two most successful teens small prizes.

There were actually several games that the teens were not able to complete at all, but they still had a lot of fun trying and laughing at each other's attempts. Since we had a fairly small, casual group we tried each challenge multiple times and found that some of the games - like Stack Attack, shown below - were a bit easier with a little team work.


All in all I think I spent about 8 dollars on this program, including snacks. We had quite a few of the supplies needed for each game already on hand at the library, and the Dollar Store provided what we didn't have.