My focus here is on what researchers have called “little c” creativity – that is, creativity within one’s personal life –not “big C” Creativity that transforms the boundaries of an entire discipline or domain. The goal is not to nurture the next Mozart or Einstein, but to help everyone become more creative in the ways they deal with everyday problems.
What I can see at my daughter’s kindergarden are the most popular kindergarten materials: blocks for building, crayons for drawing, dolls for role-playing, tiles for making geometric patterns. All of these materials are designed to encourage a child’s imagination.
Children with different interests and different learning styles can all use the same materials, but each in his or her own personal way.
In developing technologies for older learners, the idea is to achieve a similar effect. The guiding principle is “many paths, many styles” – that is, to develop technologies that can be used along many different paths, by children with many different styles. The goal is to provide tools that can be used in multiple ways, leaving more room for imagination.
Create is at the root of creative thinking. If we want children to develop as creative thinkers, we need to provide them with more opportunities to create. Friedrich Froebel understood this idea when he opened the world’s first kindergarten in 1837. Froebel filled his kindergarten with physical objects (such as blocks, beads, and tiles) that children could use for building, designing, and creating. These objects became known as Froebel’s Gifts. Froebel carefully designed his Gifts so that children, as they played and constructed with the Gifts, would learn about common patterns and forms in nature.
In effect, Froebel was designing for designers – he designed objects that enabled children in his kindergarten to do their own designing. Froebel’s work can be viewed as an early example of Seymour Papert’s constructionist approach to education [11], which aims to engage learners in personally-meaningful design experiences. In creating his Gifts, Froebel was limited by the materials available in the early 19th century. With today’s electronic and digital materials, we can create new types of construction kits, expanding Froebel’s kindergarten approach to older students working on more advanced projects and learning more advanced ideas.
Piaget famously proclaimed that “Play is the work of children.” Certainly, play has been an integral part of the traditional kindergarten approach to learning, and most adults recognize the importance of providing young children with opportunity to play. But as children grow
older, educators and parents often talk about play dismissively, referring to activities as “just play,” as if play is separate and even in opposition to learning. Iteration is at the heart of the creative process. The process of Imagine, Create, Play, Share, and Reflect inevitably leads to new ideas – leading back to Imagine and the beginning of a new cycle…
The process of becoming a creative thinker is itself an iterative process. Historically, kindergarten has provided a good foundation for creative thinking. Think of kindergarten as the first time through the creative-thinking cycle. Unfortunately, after leaving kindergarten, children have not had the opportunity to iterate on what they learned in kindergarten, to continue to develop as creative thinkers. By extending the kindergarten approach, we hope to provide opportunities for learners of all ages to build on their kindergarten experiences, iteratively refining their abilities as creative thinkers throughout their lives.
