Destination Imagination Flashbacks
Today's activity reminded me of my years in DI. We were often handed an object and told to come up with all sorts of different uses for it. As an activity, it was meant to stretch our creative thinking skills and build teamwork. It seems to me that the purpose of asking what something is does and means makes us take time to consider that object with all parts of our brain, especially our abstract thinking. My first two responses were that a a Quarter is a Decider of Fate (as in a coin flip) and a Prop for Magic, instead of describing physical characteristics. For some reason, that's just how my brain rolls. As I examined it further, I began to think about the practical, physical characteristics. The questions make us analyze, imagine, and consider the object more deeply than we usually would. Normally we take the face value of an object and look no deeper. It helps us see what our assumptions are, what the assumptions of our classmates are, and our thought process.
Brain Fart
I remember those good ol' Destination Imagination days. It was easier then because we had other people to bounce ideas off of. Today, after we got going, my ideas started to get better as we started collaborating. It really helped my creativity.
-Renee Ward
Totally
Yeah it's really interesting to have a hard time coming up with ten of those answers but then having like 50 answers on the board. Just goes to show you how narrow one persons view can be (no matter who you are), and how much that opens up when a group of people think about something together.
Brainstorming/synergy
I was a great brainstorming exercise. No one's off the wall answers got turned down, which meant we got more creativity, more answers, etc. It's also a synergy thing... 2=2=5. Together we came up with more than the sum of our parts.
Erin Kay Schulz
I don't know if this
I don't know if this happened with anyone else, but as people would say answers, those would give me other ideas. Not only were we pooling our brain power together, but we were also able to do more brainstorming individually, even though we were still part of the whole group. (I don't know if that was cheating because we were supposed to come up with ten before we started saying them, but oh well...)
Exactly
Exactly, it's an exponential increase of creativity. Through gaining others perspectives it adds more to your own perspective, maybe helping to come up with answers that no one else would, the "2+2=5" concept (maybe more like x^2).
2+2=5
I get the gist of what everyone is saying, "More people trying to find a solution get better ideas together than alone," but all these math equations are making my head spin! Anyone care to explain?
*Tina
social constructivism
Teachers who do this sort of thing engage in what are known as social constructivist behaviors, in that we construct knowledge and information together socially. It means pretty much what everyone else has said, that we can do more together than we can do apart, that we can build upon each person's prior knowledge. It has it's limits (suppose everyone is an idiot; not much knowledge is going to be constructed there). Bradley