Redditor spacecatapult is a technology teacher at an elementary school. He/she posted this time-lapse of a project called Pixel Place. Each student places a "pixel," or a small piece of paper, on the board during every class. You can see that they started out with no direction at all, but as time passed, they started working as a team. Spacecatapult took a picture every day.
I've branded this activity as "Pixel Place" because it allows students to make a physical connection with the term pixel. It's actually been very helpful when we talk about pixels in the context of coding and computers. It's also been great for all of the social reasons you are likely considering in your thesis already. At the start of the year, we mostly just had chaos. Students wanted to just make their mark somewhere. Students are seeing that they can do more and better things when they work together. They even leave sticky notes on the walls to communicate idea with students from other classes - this is truly a collaboration between 500 students. There is also a real sense of a "greater good". Sometimes kids are upset by random pixels or attempts at ruining something made by others. The larger group always seems to value making it look good though, so most vandalism is quickly undone. It's been pretty powerful, especially for something that students only spend about 30 seconds a week doing.
-via Kevin O'Connor