Tuesday, June 26 – Promoting Inventiveness in the Classroom

• Presenter: Kathy Schrock
• Session resources: Link 1; Link 2 (http://www.schrockguide.net/inventiveness.html by Kathy Schrock)

Defining Iventiveness

• Invention: the creation of a product or introduction of a process for the first time
• Innovation: occurs if someone improves on an existing product or process
• Inventiveness: the form of creativity bridging between invention and innovation

A classroom conducive to creativity:

• Physical environment
• Learning climate
• Engaged students

Design thinking: Solving problems and coming up with solutions

Show students serendipitous discoveries and epic fails so they can understand the design process.

See below for aummary of design thinking as defined here.

• Empathize – put yourself in the shoes of the person you are trying to design for
• Define – make sure you understand the problem and potential solutions
• Ideate – generate a range of crazy, creative ideas (extreme brainstorming)
• Protype – build real examples of your ideas to see what works
• Test – return to users for feedback – see if it meets the needs of your users (this is often what brings you back to the drawing board)
• Implement – market the product; put the vision into effect
• (Kathy added reflect)

Resource to check out: The Launch Cycle

Global day of design

Process of inventiveness:

Lesson plan – introduce a publication (Inventions 2015)

• Invention Revolutionizes Homework
• Look What Computers Can Do Now!
• Medical Breakthrough Announced!

4 columns: product, process, audience, tool (have them pick one from each column and come up with the invention

Cool intro to Design class activity:

Show inventions (kickstarter, indiegogo, etc.)

Ask:

• Invention or innovation?
• Did it make it?
• Why or why not?
• What would you change?

Pedagogy

Review of Bloom’s (the new one)

SAMR model – design tech task that has a significant impact on student outcomes (look up Matt Miller and how to get over the fence in the SAMR model)

This model (see tweet)

Tools and apps

Take apart old toys and create new toys with them

Kids should keep an inventor’s journal; write in journal often; include photos and illustrations of protoypes; include citations of all their sources

Use polling tools for them to get through the empathy process; social media for testing, etc. Follow the relevant hashtag for a world problem/event. No need to have a twitter account to view hashtags. Use videoconference tech to talk to experts. Watch TED talks, etc.

Defintion level: databases (look into Airtable – Kathy says it’s the best little database ever)

Once they have ideas, they can develop personas to help focus solution on audience.

Ideation stage: mind mapping tools (collaborative ones); real stickynotes or Padlet (check into catscan for padlet- you can scan in real sticky notes and it creates a padlet from those. cool!); sketchup

Testing: don’t give the user too much information; make the user feel special; ask users to compare prototypes if there are multiple prototypes

Implement (get it into the hands of the users)- Adobe Spark (need to get those accounts set up at school)

(Check out Anchor FM for podcasting)

Reflection- OneNote, EverNote, GDocs, Flipgrid, etc. Penzu (this could be really helpful for the IB interactive journals)

Check out Penzu -it’s a private journaling tool (IB lang classes)

Cool animation by elementary students here