the Creative Sight

If you needed to repair a car, where would you choose to do it? In the living room? The kitchen? The bathroom? Probably not. You'd most likely head to the garage. After all, it's where your tools are located. It's where your nuts, bolts, and, if you're like my dad, all those "extra car pieces" are. If you're lucky, you may even find a repair manual or two. Wouldn't it make sense, that the best place to be creative, would be in a place specifically designed for the task? To be clear, I'm not proposing that any single location will guarantee creativity, as much as I wish people could be creative on demand, in my experience -- sometimes it's just not there. What I am recommending is that you design a space that inspires and enhances creativity as much as possible, while at the same time removing any anti-creative elements. In this post we'll take a look at designing your own 21st century "creative space", whether it's in you...

Educators, if you're looking for a quick, fun game for your class that also serves to help everyone see things differently, more creatively , then try this "FUNctionality" activity. This is a game I developed with the help of my students the latter part of the year. It's been through a few iterations already and I present it in its most recent, and balanced, version. Before we begin, let me ask you this, how could you use the object in the image shown below? For most people, a single purpose comes to mind and I'll go out on a limb and assume that I don't have to describe it. However, for students playing our game, this object spawned a wide range of uses that included, cleaning up spills, writing messages, drawing circles, dressing up as a mummy, measuring the length of something and stuffing a pillow or stuffed animal. The Setup This little game doesn't take much, just literally the things you have around your classroom, and a stopwatch (you can...