A8CatharineStarbird

A8CatharineStarbird

To-Do

please discuss / address the following issues: claim: "Few of today's classroom focus on helping students develop as creative thinkers"

1. Do you agree / disagree with this statement of the article?
2. From your personal experience: which are the three most prominent events / activities in your life as a students (in school, in the university) which have helped you to become a more creative thinker?
   1. Analyze these three events by elaborating your description with the framework defined by the creative thinking spiral.
   2. For each of the processes did you have and use tools to support your activity?
3. Discuss whether the processes of the creative thinking spiral are or will influence your research in your course project and in which way.

1. Do you agree with the statement?

I agree with this claim. It is hard to lump graduate school experiences in with high school experiences, so let me first address the frightening memories I have of the high school experience… though these memories are faded and probably embellished. There was very little activity in my (public) high school classes, even in the sciences where experiment was, in theory, what we were trying to learn. We sat at desks, listened to teachers drone on, and were given assignments out of textbooks. I got a good deal of adolescent sleep there and did most of my "creative skills" learning at home, where I could spend hours on tasks that I defined and followed myself. I had younger brothers who I later "shared" my creations with (or tested them on.)

It is also hard for me to think of the classroom outside of this box, or to think of the current institution of education as having the flexibility to accommodate the creative learning spiral Resnick presents. The classroom, in its current manifestation, may not be the best place to teach creative thinking. For instance, this class teaches about creative thinking, but does not have the time or space to teach creative thinking itself. Creative thinking requires tinkering time and tinkering time does not necessarily fit into 1 hour or even 3 hour class periods. The structure of learning for my graduate classes includes the classical lecture periods as well as projects that require large blocks of my own time to fulfill. These projects drive the advances in my creative thinking skills, but they do not take place "the the classroom."

2. Analyze the three most prominent events / activities in your life as a students (in school, in the university) which have helped you to become a more creative thinker

In order to fulfill this assignment, I have to extend the definition of "student" outside of classroom and towards the lifelong learning model of student. I do not remember many in-school experience that caused me to become a more creative thinker. Here are the experiences that did.

When I think back to my grade school years, I recall one assignment that allowed/encouraged me to think creatively. We were to make a diorama. I chose to create a sea scape and I recall cutting out portions of food boxes to resemble underwater coral reefs and other things. The fact that I remember this project and no others from that era, indicates that it had a powerful effect on me at the time. It did contain a few of the steps Resnick located along the creative spiral. I imagined the seascape, then went about creating it. Later, I shared my creation with all of my classmates - as they shared theirs with me.

Most of my creative spiral activities occurred outside the classroom. When I was nine (in 1984), my older brother taught me how to program in BASIC on an Osborne computer. I spent hours and hours crafting text-based games for my two younger brothers to play. Every once in awhile, my older brother would introduce me to a new concept, like the character string or the array. This would typically lead to a huge spike in my productivity. The character strings allowed me to access block graphics, and soon I was making rudimentary animations. These activities fit perfectly into Resnick's "creative thinking spiral." The "tools" at my disposal were the computer and the resource of my older brother.

My brother also introduced me to the "Dungeons and Dragons" game (offline) which spawned another series of waves of creativity. I would write and create "adventures" that I would then play and share with my younger brothers. Their level of engagement (or not) guided my subsequent creations. The activity greatly enhanced my writing skills and I most certainly produced more pages of bad fantasy text than school-required writing. The "tools" for these creations were the game manuals with rules and guidelines that gave structure to the creations. ?

3. Discuss whether the processes of the creative thinking spiral are or will influence your research in your course project and in which way.

We are trying to use the "creative thinking spiral" in our project work. We have thought about creating an online story that we will share with others, allowing them to add to our creation. Currently, we are analyzing a platform that already offers this functionality. This activity requires creative thinking as well. We will have to develop a qualitative coding scheme to evaluate the story contributions of users. After creating it, we will "test" (or "play with") the scheme to see if it helps us. We may then reflect upon it, tweak it in necessary ways, and then test the new scheme.

In my own research, I am hoping to use the "creative thinking spiral" in a very similar way as Resnick (and Bruckman and even Papert) to encourage the learning of computational thinking through socially-networked activities online. My hope is to blend a structured creation environment into an existing social network.