Created to spark discussions about diversity, equity and inclusion, Diversity Beans is the perfect teaching tool to illustrate stereotyping and unconscious bias. Since jelly beans are a popular candy that holds strong associations (think black jelly bean = licorice flavor), imagine reactions when the black jelly bean (or any color for that matter) can be any one of our flavors. Our tagline (and its premise) is true: Don't judge a bean by its color!
Jelly Bean Game Diversity Quotes
One of the activities that is very common for teaching diversity or microbial diversity is the candy activity. In this activity, a sample community of candy is explored and used (and later, eaten) to make measures of diversity in a simple (and delicious) form. I elected to use jellybeans, since the known diversity would help us do this quickly. In this case, our richness is 49 (if your species definition includes flavor).
Special thanks to my young teaching assistants, who helped set up this activity. This required that we (1) go through each of the calculations, deciding on a species definition, measuring total richness in our samples, and estimating richness using Chao1 or rarefaction; and we (2) made samples for our class consisting of 40 jellybeans per cup. I stacked the cups in pairs so that for 65 students, we had 36 samples of 40 jellybeans each.
Then I walked around the family and had them choose a jellybean. Each person carefully considered which jelly bean to pick. My youngest daughter took one and then changed her mind for the jellybean she liked better. I was happy to let them take as long as they wanted, for their deliberation played into my object lesson all the more.
Discussion: We talked about the jellybean poem and what it means and how it relates to Martin Luther King Day. Here are some questions to ask: How are people different than us? Why are there so many different people? How should we treat others that are different than us? What do you do when you notice someone that is different than you?
This April 22nd is National Jelly Bean Day and a fun opportunity to teach our kids about patriarchal blessings using jelly beans! Of course this lesson can be used any time you need a patriarchal blessing lesson. Nobody is going to hold you to the holiday, even if it is a national one. This lesson would also be fun to use anytime around Easter.
Why are games like this so popular? I think it is because they make us feel validated and understood. It is nice to hear nice things about yourself even if it is tied to what color jelly bean you like.
ChaosEmerald1: What's up guys? This is ChaosEmerald1. Just about to resuscitate this gal. Uh, I've never seen this kind of game before. I think the forced diversity is a little much. I mean, why have a girl as your main character?
Changing a culture, whether in a nation or a company, is notoriously slow work. But if any corporation has reason to run a revolution, it's this one. On the Monday before Election Day, The New York Times printed transcripts of a 1994 meeting of some top officials at company headquarters. The tapes recorded them sneering and laughing at black employees --and plotting to ""purge the s--t out of'' documents in the discrimination case. Within hours, the tapes were rolling on television and radio, and the country was getting an earful: one executive appeared to call blacks ""niggers.'' Another joked that ""black jelly beans were stuck to the bottom of the bag.'' A week later, Texaco's independent investigator, having ""enhanced'' the tapes, reported that the word ""nigger'' never appeared, and that ""jelly bean'' was a reference, albeit twisted, to a metaphor used by a prominent diversity consultant. But the new transcript was hardly comforting. ""I'm still struggling with Hanukkah,'' it quotes one of the executives, ""and now we have Kwanzaa... Poor Saint Nicholas, they s--tted all over his beard.'' They go on to mock the symbols of Kwanzaa and the African-American anthem ""Lift Every Voice.''
12 year old Jake's middle school is about to be shut down. Jake and his friends know their school's worth saving-if they could only figure out how! When Jake spies a bowl of jellybeans at the hotel where his mom works, he eats them. But uh-oh-those weren't just jellybeans, one of the scientists at his mom's conference is in the process of developing the first ingestible information pills. And THAT'S what Jake ate. 2ff7e9595c