Creative Visual for Intentionally Brainstorming for Innovation and Design
Purpose: To help students engage deeply with their work using Design Thinking - using a visual organizer to intentionally brainstorm for innovation and design. This was born out of my desire to help students think like scientists do when they are doing experiments. Experiments in the scientific world are a process – not a one shot deal. Scientists are constantly brainstorming for understanding, innovation and design as they work.
The Brainstorming for Innovation and Design is modeled from IDEO www.ideo.com and TELUS SPARKS SHIFT LAB.
Tips:
• Studentscreate their own shapes for the visual organizer.
• Explain to students that they are BRAINSTORMING – generating ideas and
recording thoughts quickly.
• Encourage students to use visuals, not just words, for capturing thoughts
• Tell students it’s perfectly OK to design feasible things – but it’s lots of fun
togo wild and design more radical things!
• Have students fill out the sheet asthey are doing their labs (not afterwards) to
encourage scientific brainstorming as they experiment.
Formative Assessment:
• Does it spark? when shared with peers, an expert or others do they get all
enthused, when working on this is the individual or group sparking,throwing
lots of ideas around, playing with ideas? (thanks to my Bio 20 course 2014)
• Could it/Did it lead to deeper scholarly work? Individual or group used lots
ofsources/ideas, but then built on them, creating a dynamic, rich environment
for new ideas to evolve. Played with the ideas in lots of ways, pushing science
forward (thanks to Galileo Educational Network U of Calgary
)
Happy unforeseen consequences!
• this turned out to be a fantastic, meaningful and much more engaging way for
students to capture what interested them personally in their research
for a Green Architecture project.
• and,a much better way to capture what a field tripmeant to them.
• marking labs is much more fun!
• I now have wonderful insights to start meaningful conversation and
relationshipswith students that I would not have otherwise given my large
class sizes.
GO WILD!
Thank you toTelus Sparks Shift Lab July 2015, my cousin Daniel Campbell (from Pixar) for inspiring me about intentional creativity, and Cochrane High School and the RockyView School Divisionfor supporting this work in my classroom.