Roller Coaster Tycoon Challenge

My goal with the challenge today is to create an environment where we can observe the kids... not necessarily to design the perfect challenge yet. We've got some time to draft better challenges and test them this summer. Today, I want to see how the kids work together, how they teach each other simple math concepts, and how they work together to problem solve in RCT. I've intentionally created a fairly simple challenge... and I plan to limit the amount of questions the kids can ask adults... to force them to solve it with each other.

I think there will be other challenges, such as personality conflicts between the kids (present in any classroom), problems understanding how to do certain things in the game ("how do we add a janitor?), and not understanding how to maximize use of time to make money (for example, they want to get the game up, going and running as soon as possible). this pilot activity should give us some good data to build better modules.

I tried it yesterday, and was able to build a game to these specs pretty easily:
They should start (in career mode) with the Vanilla Park. They should:
- have 10 "things", including food booths and rides, but *not* counting scenery or gardens, bathrooms, first aid stops or info desks
- 40% of all "things" should be food/drink shops
- there should be a 1 to 2 ratio of bathrooms to food/drink shops
- there should be a 1 to 3 ratio of mechanics to rides
- I'd like to do something like "at least 10% of money spent should be on new landscaping" but I can't figure out how to measure that.

- Winners have the most money at the end (unless we should not make it competitive.. what do you think? would this fuel some of the personality conflicts already there?)

I plan to tape today so we can document what I tell them, and the end result. I'll try to blog about our observations.