A8ZaynabAaronErynMaryamJacobBen

A8ZaynabAaronErynMaryamJacobBen

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?

As a team we agreed with the statement due to the following reasons:

-Classrooms provide fundamental knowledge which was accumulated over time, and school have little emphasis on how to implement their knowledge in their daily life; therefore knowledge learned in school is disconnected from today's technological improvements and consequently, seems useless and not applicable to students.

-Schools tend to teach solutions to very specific problems, and the author notes that in a quote, "many students learn to solve specific types of problems, but they are unable to adapt and improvise". On some level, if someone has learned to solve a specific example of a problem, they haven't really learned how to solve that problem at all. Knowing how to solve the general case, or how to solve the problem under changing conditions, is really the benchmark for being able to solve the problem. That in itself requires creativity and deep understanding. On the other hand, teaching creativity and creating an environment of creativity can be difficult. However, teaching general ideas rather than specific examples can be detrimental, as students often need the concreteness of specific cases in order to learn. In the end, the goal should be a sort of balance between solving general, open problems requiring creativity and also the specific examples and cases that teach the required skills in order to solve the harder problems.

-Education needs to have a more creative aspect to it. If kids are really interested in learning something, technology offers a great way to facilitate that learning. It can offer a way of learning about core concepts without directly taught to students, students have to actively learn it. Like the variable example in the article, if you teach variables to kids in a very direct approach it won;t seem that interesting, but if they have a need for it while they are working on a larger project, suddenly the concept of a variable can click and make sense.

-Schools today have very little to do with kids being able to really create or design anything new. They have to rely on what is available and already created. For example in classes such as Physics, Math or Computers, students are rarely taught to innovate, they are taught to memorize what has been done before them. They don't have the opportunity to see that math and science can be expressive.

-If we compare the structure of course material as similar to that of a waterfall model it can be seen that it is very rigid where the types of courses required for students doesn't change all that much, neither does the content from year to year. This type of model limits the ways in which courses can be taken, or new curriculum to be created.

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

-Aaron:

1. Mars Rover Project (Summer 2003)

a.The project consisted of a problem (picking up rocks and dump them into a container). The design process was open ended in what exactly we had to build, but the development process was structured, first we sketched out ideas, then drew them on a CAD program, cut out a prototype with foamboard then tested and made adjustments to our design prototype to create a final product to be cut out of plastic with a laser cutter.

Comparing this to the framework defined by the creative thinking spiral it is clear that the first few steps were present in this design activity, although we weren't allowed to 'share' our designs because it was a competition, there was a reflection period however it took place during our design phase and wasn't exactly commented on by fellow peers but suggestions from the advisors. Although the tools and support were there for us to

2. MESA Mouse Trap Cars.

1. This project consisted of similar design processes of the rover project and was also open ended on what exactly we had to build, the problem to be solved was to accomplish three tasks of precision, power, and speed. These cars were designed only to require one mouse trap and certain design specifications.

This project was is also similar to the last when comparing to the creative thinking spiral. It was also a competition so there was no real sharing aspect of our design, only during our development process was reflection used and it was peer group comments about the design which changed. Similar design tools were used in this process except a prototype was created by using different material.

3. GEEN 1400 (Computer Science related).

In this course we were to design a game using javascript to teach an engineering concept. This was very open ended on what topic we wanted to base our game off. It had a lot of aspects similar to that of the creative thinking spiral except for we didn't have much sharing that was involved. Tools were lacking really in helping us be creative in what we wanted to design. We were only allowed to create programs in javascript, and our only support was the research we did on our own as a group and background knowledge about javascript from the professor.

-Ben: When I was a freshman, my CSCI 1300 class had an open ended final project, we could program anything we wanted. A lot of student created simple games in python. Many of us hadn't programmed before, so this led us to learning about new parts of languages we hadn't learning in the course. I started to use recursion before I had any idea what it was. We were allowed to go and explore our selves and this ends up passively teaching me a lot about programming. I had to learn a python framework for creating games,PyGame, before I even knew what a framework was

-Eryn: One of my personal experiences is in my first computer science class I took at CU we had to create a CD Player. At the time I didn't have very good computer skills and was limited to what I could do, but I had a really fun time designing it. I wanted it to look nice enough that I may continue to use it, my own personalized CD player. I imagined what I wanted it to be like, like the picture I would use as the background. Then I created it, not very complex, but it could do all the basic functions. Played around with it of course. When I was done I thought of some other things to do with it, like make some letters follow the mouse around when it was on the screen. It was one of the first programs that I was able to do and really have a fun time designing. Making things look cool is important to me and I have a fun time while doing it, which I really didn't get to do until college. They gave me the skills to create the program, so the code was the only tool I used.

-Jacob: I haven't really done anything in school that really helped me become a creative thinker. The majority of my courses have been of the "here's a procedure, now run through the motions and solve these problems I gave you" variety. Or the alternate, "here's a hard problem, but I'm going to pretty much solve the difficult part for you and let you fill in the trivial details" variety.

-Zaynab: In Iran, the emphasis of schools are on math and sciences rather that how to creatively use knowledge. There was little emphasis on innovation and creativity, if any.

-Maryam: I too never experienced a creative class during my years in school, especially in Iran. Howevere, to some extent these can be counted as a creative platform, although each course was very rigid: First year at UofToronto, 1)We, as a team of various engineers, had a project where we designed something for our clients: a toy for a pet gecko (there was an option of octopus or penguin as well). the only limit was the budget in which we had to work in and the device had to be educational. Our team designed a maze/living area for the animal which had various obstacles and prizes at the end of the obstacle. The obstacle changed its form once every week and repeated after 7 weeks.

2)Second semester first year, being part of another design team: we designed a rotating wall for a theater which delivered actors to the stage on a creative manner. this wall was the center piece for the play.

3)Leadership course: Throughout the semester each person had to run a campaign for what was drawn on the board by another random student. These drawings were random scribbles of cats, houses, devices, aliens, etc. The presenting student had to convince the audience of the great functionality the deice had.

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

All of the portions of the creative thinking spiral will influence our research project. The spiral is very relevant especially to wikis, other than the play step, every step is an integral part in the life of a wiki. In fact, the reflection bubble actually leads to the collaboration between people, and ultimately a person thinking on a new spiral. Since our project is an idea for a new, next-generation wiki, we will have to imagine the features, functionality, and design of this new concept for a wiki. We will have to create a conceptual framework from which the wiki could be built. We'll have to play around not only with this conceptual framework, but also play around with other wikis to get a good feel of what makes wikis succeed or fail, and what we could further implement, remove, or tweak in our design.

Since wikis are a platform for collaboration, we'll no doubt share this conceptual framework to solicit feedback. We'll reflect on this feedback to help us improve the design, and then we'll re-imagine the concept of our next-generation wiki, starting the spiral all over again.

We will take note of how wiki's play an important role in the sharing aspect of learning, also it will give a place for comments for people using wikis to reflect and create a better understanding of what they share. At the same time, we need to be aware of our audience their age group and level of education. In order to design a wiki that is suitable for all users.

The main question we will ask is: How are they able to imagine, create and so on, through wikis?