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Inventor Spotlight: Angad Arora

With this blog we are launching our Inventor Spotlight series that highlight some of our student inventors who came up with a neat idea for an invention.

Our inventor this time is Angad Arora, who came up with a design for a suitcase that makes the job of packing easier, by providing feedback on the weight while it’s being packed. Angad’s invention won a national level award as part of the “Student Ideas for a Better America” competition organized by the National Museum of Education. He designed the suitcase as part of our summer camp, held in collaboration with the Archimedes School.

We had a short Q&A with Angad after he won the award.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

My name is Angad and I am in 4th grade Quest program at Redmond Elementary. Science interests and fascinates me as it is everywhere around us. I would like to research more about the human DNA when I grow up.  

What is your invention and how does it work?

My invention, “Super Professional Suitcase” is a concept of the weighing of suitcases, made easier. The suitcase comes with a pressure sensor that warns you as you start reaching the airline weight limit. It does this while you are packing, so you don’t have to stop and weigh each time.

How did you come up with the idea?

The inspiration of this idea came from our yearly trips to India. For these trips we buy gifts for our extended family. The airlines allocate certain weight limits per suitcase. To adhere to this weight, limit the packing takes a while with many rounds of putting and taking out stuff. I noticed that my parents get exhausted after this task.

Did your prototype work? How was that experience?

For my prototype I used a shoebox to resemble a suitcase and installed a pressure sensor system at the bottom of the box. I had to carefully assemble the circuit. The procedure was to:

  1. Make a copper wire circuit system with a LED that is incomplete at a certain point
  2. Get a pressure sensor that has a piece of copper wire that attached to it
  3. Put tape on to the pressure sensor
  4. TEST- put weight in the shoebox- the pressure sensor will connect to the copper wire circuit causing the LED to light up

What did you learn from the summer camp?

I learned that if I wanted to make an amazing invention, I would have to think outside of the box and think  creatively – by being original with my ideas, and trying to solve a problem.

What is your most fun memory from the camp?

The teachers were very engaging and helped you think of the most imaginative ideas you could think of. We played many brain games that made you think outside the box.

What kind of problems do you want to solve when you grow up?

I want to solve existing problems for people so that they can have an easier and convenient future.

What will you be using your prize money for?

I will use the prize money to buy an experiment kit for my next prototype!

Congratulations Angad for a well deserved award! We hope you continue to solve more problems and we look forward to more ideas from you.

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Revitalizing Computer Science Education Through Creativity

If you were to pick the odd one out from these three things – television, computers, finger paint – which one would it be? If you are like most people, “finger paint” would stick out as the obvious answer for you.

However, that is exactly why Professor Mitchel Resnick, Professor at MIT and creator of Scratch, thinks we shortchange computer science education. As he explains, “But until we start to think of computers more like finger paint and less like television, computers will not live up to their full potential.” Just like finger paints and unlike televisions, computers can be used for designing and creating things.

Prof. Resnick believes that the focus of education in the 21st century should be to teach children to become creative thinkers. In a paper explaining his rationale he notes, “For today’s children, nothing is more important than learning to think creatively – learning to come up with innovative solutions to the unexpected situations that will continually arise in their lives. Unfortunately, most schools are out-of-step with today’s needs: they were not designed to help students develop as creative thinkers.”

His group at MIT designed the highly popular Scratch programming environment with a “creativity first” approach. The goal of Scratch isn’t simply to teach programming constructs like loops and conditionals, but to encourage the spiraling creative process of imagine, create, play, share, reflect and imagine.

Incorporating creativity in computer science education has already shown several benefits. Researchers at a university in Ohio retooled their computer science classes to encourage more creative, hands-on learning. They found that in addition to an improvement in the quality of student work, the three year retention rate increased by 34%! This is especially important for women, who typically view computer science courses  “to be overly technical, with little room for individual creativity. ”

In our latest hands-on program, “Creative Android Apps”, offered in partnership with the Archimedes School, we taught mobile app development (using MIT App Inventor) while keeping creativity a central aspect of the program. The students used several creative thinking techniques to come up with their own project to design and build. While we taught them the fundamental building blocks of programming, they went through the creative spiral process to iterate and improve their apps.

Our goal was to go beyond teaching the basics of app development to inspiring students  towards computer science and STEM.

And we were truly impressed with apps that our students came up with – from managing and scheduling time,  to fundraising and even an app to help others learn machine learning! But what warmed us up most were when two of our middle-school girls said “I didn’t know programming could be so much fun!” and “I felt like I was Bill Gates.”

We hope these students continue their journey towards learning and creating, and we look forward to our next Bill Gates!

 

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Effective Feedback for a Growth Mindset

Suppose your child comes to you disappointed after receiving a B- on a math test that he worked really hard preparing for. What would you say to him?

If you already know about growth mindset, you know saying something along the lines of, “It’s OK, maybe you are just not a math person” isn’t the smartest thing. You should be focusing on the effort he put in instead of his inherent ability.

How about – “Great effort! I am sure you’ll do better next time”? Would that work better?

Not really.

In general, focusing on effort as opposed to ability increases intrinsic motivation over the long term. However, in certain situations, focusing on effort can actually make things worse. When the work results in a failure, focusing on effort solely can still leave the child feeling inept. Or if effort is overemphasized for relatively easy tasks, children may infer that as a sign of their low ability.

Growth mindset and intrinsic motivation go hand in hand. Children with a growth mindset are more likely to regulate their behavior for intrinsic reasons (e.g. I enjoy doing this activity) whereas children with a fixed mindset are more likely to regulate their behavior for extrinsic reasons (e.g. I want my parents to think I am a good student).

Having a growth mindset is clearly superior to a fixed mindset, since growth mindset enhances intrinsic motivation which in the long term improves perseverance and resilience against failure. But how do you inculcate a growth mindset in your child? If you as a parent model a growth mindset would that rub off on your child?

Carol Dweck, Professor at Stanford, and the originator of the mindset theory of intelligence, found that there is no link between parents’ mind-sets and their children’s. Parents’ own mindsets aren’t generally not visible to their children because they don’t necessarily manifest in parental practices. For instance, parents can have a growth mind-set but still praise their child’s talent, leading their child to develop a fixed mindset. 

However, one factor that does influence children’s mindset is not their parents’  intelligence mindset but their parent’s failure mindset. As Carol Dweck explains, “parents can view failure as either enhancing or debilitating, that this belief manifests itself in their reactions to their children’s setbacks, and that it influences their children’s intelligence mind-sets.”

So how can you handle a  failure situation more effectively?

When faced with a setback, a better approach is to frame the feedback in a more broader process-oriented feedback that includes thoughtful analysis of strategies and new approaches to explore. Think of the effort-oriented feedback as a subset of the larger process-oriented feedback. 

So, instead of simply saying “Good effort!”, use Prof Dweck’s recommendation and try this – “The point isn’t to get it all right away. The point is to grow your understanding step by step. What can you try next?” And follow this up with a discussion of what strategy did not work and what strategies might be worth trying the next time.

 

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How Intrinsic Motivation Can Help Creativity

In 1971, Edward Deci did an experiment on college students to understand motivation and performance. These students were given puzzles to solve which Deci believed they would be intrinsically motivated to solve. Students in the control group did not receive any money to work on the puzzles, while students in the experimental group were paid only on the second day.  The experimenter gave a break in the middle of the experiment each day to see how long students played with the puzzles when left alone.

Deci found that students who were paid on the second day, spent longer on the puzzles during the break. However, on the third day when they were not paid, they spent significantly less time playing with the puzzles than the control group. Deci interpreted this as evidence that an external reward decreases the intrinsic motivation to engage in an activity.

Deci along with Ryan expanded on this work to propose the Self Determination Theory (SDT). The SDT outlines three universal psychological needs – autonomy, competence and relatedness – which govern individual motivation. Need for competence and autonomy form the basis of intrinsic motivation.

Monetary rewards have shown some benefit in performance if the task is more manual in nature or when people have identified with an activity’s value. For complex problems requiring creative problem solving skills, intrinsic motivation plays a bigger role.

Teresa Amabile, Professor at Harvard Business School and Creativity expert, has found plenty of evidence of what she calls the “Intrinsic Motivation Principle of Creativity”, namely that “people will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself-and not by external pressures.”

Given the strong connection between creativity and intrinsic motivation, here are three ways to maintain intrinsic motivation.

Praise, Don’t Reward

Praising instead of giving a monetary reward works better in improving intrinsic motivation, even though both are forms of external rewards. However, for praise to be effective it should focus on the effort as opposed to ability, should not convey low expectation and should not convey information about competence solely through social comparison.

Focus on Others

While intrinsic motivation drives creativity, it turns out that it drives the “originality” component of creativity and not the “useful” aspect. Prof. Adam Grant’s research has shown that focusing on solving others’ problems improves creativity in the “useful” aspect as well. As he explains, “perspective taking, as generated by prosocial motivation, strengthens the association between intrinsic motivation and creativity.”

Embrace failure

Any creative task by definition has a lot of uncertainty and success isn’t guaranteed. Creating a mindset where failure is appreciated for the knowledge it brings on what doesn’t work, can go a long way in building intrinsic motivation. In Prof. Amabile’s words, “… if people do not perceive any “failure value” for projects that ultimately do not achieve commercial success, they’ll become less and less likely to experiment, explore, and connect with their work on a personal level. Their intrinsic motivation will evaporate”

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Superheros to the Rescue

How do creative ideas come about? What cognitive processes underlie creativity? These questions have been a source of fascination and research among psychologists for a long time. One thinking pattern that comes up most often as an explanation is associative thinking.  

The first influential theory that tied associative thinking to creativity was put forth by Mednick. He defined the creative thinking process as the “forming of associative elements into new combinations which either meet specified requirements or are in some way useful.” He proposed that how associations are organized in the brain determines how creative people are. Less creative people show steep associative hierarchies (only a few associations will show high associative response strength) while highly creative people have flat associative hierarchies.

While some of Mednick’s predictions didn’t turn out to be true, he was right about the associative nature of creativity. Recent research is starting to reveal more about associative thinking and how it ties to both creativity and intelligence.

Benedek and colleagues investigated associative processes and how they impact creativity and intelligence. The four kinds of associative processes they studied were:

  • Associative Fluency – The ability to generate as many associations as possible to a given trigger. For example, apple:  “red”, “juicy”, “round”.
  • Associative Flexibility – The ability to build a long and diversified associative chain where each item is associated only to the preceding one. For example, apple: “red”, “blood”, “bandaid”.
  • Dissociative Ability – The ability to generate a list of unrelated concepts. For example, apple: “pencil”, “shirt”, “screwdriver”.
  • Associative Combination – The ability to find an associations related to completely unrelated stimuli. For example apple – beanbag: “round”, “squishy”.

Their analysis showed that “associative combination and dissociative ability are significant predictors of creativity, whereas both have no significant relationship to intelligence. In contrast, intelligence is predicted by associative flexibility, which in turn has no significant relationship to creativity.”

Our latest brainteaser category, “Superheros to the Rescue”, suggested by a MindAntix user, builds on the associative combination thinking. In this kind of brainteaser, there are two completely unrelated concepts – a crisis (e.g. the family kitten is stuck on a tree) and a Superhero with a rather strange superpower (e.g. the “Whipped Cream Man” who can shoot foamy, gooey whipped cream) who needs to save the day. The key to solving the brainteaser is to construct a story that uses the superpower in a meaningful way to solve the problem.

We love this idea from our user because it beautifully captures the essence of the combinatorial form of associative thinking in a fun way. Well done! In fact, constructing a brainteaser in this category builds both the dissociative ability (the crisis and the super power are completely unrelated) and the associative combination (the solution has to tie the two concepts in a meaningful way).

So it’s your turn now. Can you think of a way the Whipped Cream Man could help save the kitten? Have fun using your imagination and creativity to solve this!