Tonight I will describe what happened at work today. But it doesn't really count as discussing work, because it isn't technical and isn't at all related to anything I normally do at work. The purpose was to foster community among employees and make it a friendler place to work.

I am also betting no one close to this community will read my blog, so they won't figure out where I work or what I do. Not that I intend to discuss technical stuff here anyways.

Today, employees were invited to take their kids with them to work. I think this started as a national girls to work day. The national day was held in April timeframe and its intent was to expose girls to a variety of career choices and encourage them to pursue higher studies. However, it's discriminatory to invite girls only. And an April date conflicted with school.

My company puts on a major production. We have keynotes for the kids and workshops and other fun sessions throughout the day. There is a special kid-friendly menu in our cafeteria (it didn't look much better than the normal fare) and the kids round out the day by running amok among our cubicles.

In addition, kids from the community can get volunteer hosts to escort them, so not all the kids were the offspring of my coworkers. Or, rather, employees without children can borrow a kid to escort for the day. Either way.

My group hosted a workshop called the "Lemonade Stand". It's roughly modeled after "The Apprentice" and the computerized lemonade stands I played on the old Apple computers in grade school.

The kids are broken up into small teams. They are given "seed money" with which they must purchase an advertising banner (more colorful banners sell more lemonade) and glasses of lemonade to sell. At the start of each day, they get a weather prediction (based on a die roll) and decide how much lemonade to buy based on this prediction. Another roll of the die determines the accuracy of the prediction, and there is a formula that determines the actual number of glasses sold. This simulation continues for a week. The volunteer leads guide the kids through the banner creation and helps work the math on the whiteboard.

As I told them this morning, there are three goals:
1. Make a profit. They must recoup the money spent on the banner and initial lemonade purchase.
2. Make more money than the other team.
3. Make as much money as possible.

It looked like the kids had fun. There were a few who couldn't stop talking about it afterwards. We could hear them telling their parents all about how much money they made. If I do say so myself, I thought I designed the rules rather well. The session had a mixture of activities that required all sorts of skills: creative (team name selection and banner creation), physical (die rolls), and analytical (computing profit and determining how much lemonade to buy).

The volunteers had fun, too. The sessions were fast-paced, involved lots of teaching and coaching, and the computation was just complicated enough to be challenging for the adults. Well, the math wasn't so complicated, it was having to be accurate in a short amount of time.

I learned several things:
1. If the team is large enough, it helps to designate one kid to do whiteboard duty.
2. It helps to write out the formula in a "fill in the blanks" format on the whiteboard.
3. The kids have more fun if they take turns rolling the die. Also if each gets their own marking pen when drawing the banner.
4. One really good extension to the algorithm is to allow the sale of hot chocolate on nasty weather days. There would be a second formula for the hot chocolate sold, which would be almost the inverse of the lemonade formula. The profit margins might be slimmer on the hot chocolate. And all the weights would be adjusted to make it more difficult to make a profit.
5. The weights could be made more complicated by rolling a pair of dice instead of a die.
6. The banner options could be expanded to include more colors, or even the option of not buying a banner at all. Nobody bothered to add colors during the simulation, so that option can be eliminated.
7. Maybe there should be a fixed rent/insurance/utilities fee charged every day. This makes it tougher to decide whether to buy lemonade to sell or just sit the day out.
8. The options can be slimmed down to make the algorithm easier for a younger audience.

All in all, this was a fun experience. But we'll have to come up with something different for next year.