How to teach creativity and innovation
I sat through a science and engineering contest for school kids today.
I didn’t know what to expect before today. All I knew was what the teacher told me: that they would have a certain amount of time to build something that involves physics, and that they would be given instructions.
Sounds cool.
I went to support my son - who decided that he’d like to participate - and I am absolutely BLOWN AWAY. I discovered a few valuable insights and experienced a whole spectrum of emotions while watching them that I wanted to document:
Children (and people in general) are more capable than we think, if we give them the freedom.
At the start, the organizers handed out a few copies of the instruction booklet to the audience. I took a look at the instructions and did a double-take
…. because they were not what I expected at all.
Instead of step-by-step instructions, the kids were given specific criteria that they had to meet in order to score points. Apart from that, they had free rein.
Let’s say the project was to build a remote controlled car. The first criteria to meet (worth 30 points) might be: 1) The car is 1 m long and 500 cm wide at the base. 2) The car is shaped like a race car.
And that’s all the instructions there are for the first part! The kids had to come up with their own strategy of which metal bars to use, how and where to join them together, and come up with a suitable shape for the car.
It was interesting to watch because it was impossible to cheat: every team had a different idea of what a race car looks like, so they were all different in shapes, with connections at different places. Additional points were awarded for creativity (how much it resembled a race car) and neatness (bars
attached at appropriate places) and accuracy (was the length 1 m or 800 cm?).
It was absolutely fascinating watching the kids interpret the criteria and come up with their own ideas.
If children can do this, so can we adults. When did we - by we I mean me (I shouldn’t assume you’re in the same situation) - lose the ability to think like that?
I think the problem is that I’ve been conditioned/spoon-fed since childhood. I’ve always been told what to do, how to do it, etc. Even nowadays, the resources that I access tend to tell me exactly how to do things step-by-step.
Sure, that method has its strengths. But I learned a valuable lesson today, in that it’s so important to allow others the freedom to choose their own path. To give them the hard boundaries, and then to allow them to take ownership of how they decide to go about it.
The results may far exceed anything I can dream of.
The way to cultivate this creativity and innovative trait is by doing it.
If there’s a time to toss someone into the deep end, this is it.
This isn’t a skill that can be taught step-by-step. It’s impossible to teach someone how to think by giving them detailed instructions.
The only way to nurture creative thinking is by issuing challenges that will ‘force’ creative thinking.
By asking challenging, open-ended questions. By setting challenging tasks. By not providing answers.
The process is frustrating. Mistakes - a lot of it - are going to be made. But each mistake is a step in the right direction, because it’s a lesson learnt.
Thomas Edison was right when he said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
We will succeed if only we try enough times.
And in the process, we end up with a creative and innovative streak …. thanks to the countless, neccessary pivots along the way.
There are times when helping will do more harm than good. Sometimes, the best thing to do is to leave people alone.
The one thing I noticed about me was how frustrated I was at having to sit there quietly without helping. We weren’t allowed, but there’s wisdom is not allowing assistance (even it if wasn’t a contest) because helping the kids would have caused more harm than good.
Had I been allowed to help, I would have taken over, shown them what to do, told them what to do, get them to just follow my instructions (rather than give them the autonomy), etc. It would have ended up being MY project rather than theirs. They may very well have won by a mile, but the victory would have been hollow because it wasn’t a true win.
And the next time they’re put in a similar situation, they won’t be able to complete the project without external help. They might even come to expect help. It’s a case of 'why learn to fish if someone will just give us fish?’
It was really difficult to hold back and restrain myself. But the practice of sitting there the whole morning while biting my tongue taught me a precious lesson: that sometimes, leaving people alone is the best thing I can do for their own good.
Helping can hurt. It takes wisdom to know when and how to help.
That’s that! All in all, it was a good day. Lots of lessons learned all around, and I’d like to think that both my child and I are growing into ourselves with every experience we go through.
