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Computational Thinking and Creativity

In the decade between 2002 and 2012, the number of Bachelor degrees awarded in Computer and Information Sciences fell by more than 17%, the largest decline for any field in that time period. While graduation rates in Computer Science have been ticking up more recently, we still do not produce enough graduates to fill the growing demand for STEM jobs prompting Obama to comment: “Growing industries in science and technology have twice as many openings as we have workers who can do the job.”

One reason for the low number of STEM graduates is the high attrition rate (~50%) due to students who switch their major. Students whose first exposure to a programming language is in college find the coursework and getting good grades challenging. Researchers studying this phenomenon found that, “due to the difficulty experienced in learning to program, some students drop from the major all together instead of continuing and learning a different programming language or choosing an alternative technology track.” One clear solution is to start introducing computer science fundamentals, or computational thinking, earlier in schools. Computational thinking is an approach to formulating problems in a way that computers and other tools could be used to solve them.

Proponents of introducing computational thinking in K-12 point out, “All of today’s students will go on to live a life heavily influenced by computing, and many will work in fields that involve or are influenced by computing. They must begin to work with algorithmic problem solving and computational methods and tools in K-12.” That leads us to the next problem – how do you introduce a kindergartner to algorithms and programming concepts?

One approach that is gaining traction worldwide is the Computer Science Unplugged project. Initiated at the University of Canterbury, it uses games and activities to expose children to the kind of thinking that is expected of a computer scientist, all done without using any computers. One reason that the Unplugged approach is becoming popular is that it requires less commitment and resources to introduce children to computational thinking. But what exactly does computational thinking involve?

Mitchel Resnick, professor at MIT whose group created the Scratch programming language for kids, and his collaborator identified three dimensions of computational thinking – computational concepts (the concepts designers employ as they program), computational practices (the practices designers develop as they program), and computational perspectives (the perspectives designers form about the world around them and about themselves).

In our newest after-school program, currently in pilot, we are using the unplugged concept to not only introduce children to computational thinking concepts (like sequential logic, conditionals or flowcharts) but also creative thinking (changing perspectives, associational and analogical thinking) and storytelling. During this program children will create a puppet show that incorporates some programming and creative thinking elements, to make a fun and interactive final show.  

Both computational thinking and creative thinking are now considered critical 21st century skills. In fact, merging creative thinking exercises in computer science education has actually been shown to improve learning of computational thinking. Our goal with this program is to help children grow into more effective problem solvers.

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How to be an Original

Our world is rapidly becoming more complex. The kinds of challenges we face today, like the effects of technological advancement and global warming, will require unprecedented levels of innovation and ingenuity to solve. So what can we do now to ensure that we eventually overcome these challenges and move the world forward in a healthy direction?

The key might lie in developing people who not just excel at traditional academics (what most gifted programs focus on exclusively), but who can also think creatively and get their ideas adopted. Or, as the renowned organizational psychologist, Adam Grant, likes to call them –  “Originals”.

In his latest book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Adam Grant notes that “Although child prodigies are often rich in talent and ambition, what holds them back from moving the world forward is that they don’t learn to be original. As they perform in Carnegie Hall, win the science Olympics, and become chess champions, something tragic happens: Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new. The gifted learn to play magnificent Mozart melodies and beautiful Beethoven symphonies, but never compose their own original scores.”

Using surprising insights sprinkled throughout the book, Grant shows how anyone can learn to be an Original. While his insights cover the gamut from coming up creative ideas to championing them effectively in the workplace, here are three learnings that would be useful to adopt even as early as elementary school age.

Generate Lots Of Ideas

The best way to find that creative, game-changing idea, is to have lots of ideas. In fact, that’s what the eminently creative people in all fields do. Mozart composed more than 600 pieces before he died at the age of thirty-five, but only a handful of them made it into London Philharmonic Orchestra’s 50 greatest pieces of classical music. Similarly, Edison, one of the most prolific inventors known, had over a thousand patents over his lifetime. While most people know him as the inventor of the lightbulb and the phonograph, few know that many of his ideas, like a creepy talking doll and concrete beds, completely failed. 

Oftentimes, a truly creative idea is lurking behind the less creative ones, and can only be seen after the other ideas have gotten out of the way. In a study done on the Alternate Uses Task, researchers found that participants arrived at more novel responses after the initial wave of obvious ones (after 9 responses, in their case). The researchers recommend that “To get more original solutions, one must push past and build upon the ideas generated first to arrive at the less obvious ideas and associations.”

Even in an area like Mathematics, not typically considered a creative field, coming up with more than one solution to a problem has been shown to improve and deepen understanding in that topic.

Start With The Unfamiliar And Make It Familiar

One powerful technique to come with original ideas is to use an unfamiliar or novel starting point.  Justin Berg, a creativity expert at Stanford, asked people to design some novel products to help job interviewees as part of an experiment. When he gave them a familiar starting point of a 3-ring binder, most of the ideas that people could come up with were fairly obvious. But when he gave them a starting point of inline-skates for roller blading, the group generated ideas that were rated 37% higher in originality.

Starting with an unfamiliar or random stimulus helps people break free of the typical associations and forces them to find new ones, generating more unusual ideas. This is the underlying mechanism for the “Wacky Inventions” brainteaser and the Japanese art of Chindogu.

Develop An Artistic Hobby

A fascinating study that Adam highlights in his book, compared Nobel Prize-winning scientists to typical scientists who were equally technically proficient in their fields. The researchers found one surprising correlation –  the Nobel Prize winners were significantly more likely to be involved in arts than their less accomplished peers.  If the artistic hobby was drawing or painting, the likelihood of being a Nobel winner went up to 7x, and for performing arts like theater, dance or magic the odds were as high as 22x!

So why does that happen?

One reason is because an interest in arts is a reflection of a curious mind. But more importantly, the artistic hobby itself can help build new associations and spur new creative insights. The reason that Galileo was the first astronomer to discover mountains on the moon, was because he recognized the tell-tale zig-zag pattern of dark and light regions, due to his training in an artistic technique called chiaroscuro. As Adam Grant explains, “…it’s not just that a certain kind of original person seeks out exposure to the arts.  The arts also serve in turn as a powerful source of creative insight.“

To learn more about originals, check out Adam’s insightful TED talk.

 

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Would We Still Learn From Finland a Decade From Now?

The Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA measures students educational competence in areas like math, reading and science. Since 2000, when they first started assessments, PISA has grown in popularity and its results are eagerly awaited every three years. Part of the reason that the PISA gained so much press was that the first time PISA results came out, they took everyone by surprise.

Before PISA started testing, most people looked up to Germany and United States as models for how to run educational systems. The results, however, showed that those two countries were actually closer to the average than the top. As one policy expert expressed, “Everyone was going to the US all the time – no-one goes to the US any more to see how they do schooling… no-one thinks that the US is the international model for how to do schooling.”

The one country that started to gain recognition for it’s stellar performance was Finland. Not only did the Finnish students score near the top in all subject areas, they did it with a lot less effort. Finnish students aren’t formally tested till they are 16, barely get any homework and get more recess time than students in other countries. Since then, Finland has been a popular destination spot for everyone learning to improve schooling in their countries. So, how did Finland get to the top spot?

Ironically, Finland never tried to design its educational system to beat any rankings. Instead, they based their educational reform on their values of equity, hiring teachers who are highly trained and trusting them to teach effectively.  Students don’t go through any standardized testing, even internally, and teachers get freedom to teach the subjects the way they like. So, when the PISA results first came out in 2000, the outcome surprised even the Finns.

In his book, “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?”, Pasi Sahlberg, the influential Finnish educator, gave a glimpse of their future educational directions that include problem solving, creativity, engagement and interpersonal skills. Specifically for creativity, he notes, “…students’ ability to create something valuable and new in school will be more important than ever – not just for some students, but for most of them. If creativity is defined as coming up with original ideas that have value, then creativity should be as important as literacy and treated with the same status. Finnish schools have traditionally encouraged risk-taking, creativity and innovation. These traditions need to be strengthened.”

In the latest PISA tests of 2012, Finnish students’ test scores had declined across all the subjects and the country is in the midst of  their latest reform set to be in place for the 2016-17 school year. But instead of focusing solely on test scores, the latest reforms are cutting down a bit on strict numeracy and literacy to make space for other initiatives like Phenomenon Based Learning, which emphasize 21st century skills like collaboration, creativity and problem solving.

Using a narrow set of test scores to evaluate educational systems, isn’t necessarily the best model as pointed out by critics in their open letter to the organizers of PISA. The race to improve national scores has pushed more countries towards adopting standardized testing and consequently, teaching to the test. Given the changing job market that prioritizes creative problem solving, it seems less likely that students coached with this approach will thrive. 

The more holistic approach to education that is currently being undertaken by Finland certainly seems promising in that light. So maybe in a few years, we will be looking up to Finland once again for their latest lessons.

 

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3 Improvisational Games to Boost Creativity

If you were to pick a team to design your next product, who would you choose – a team of professional product designers or a group of improvisational comedians? If you took the first option, you might want to think again. Barry Kudrowitz, an assistant professor and director of product design at University of Minnesota, conducted this exact experiment as part of his Ph.D. thesis at MIT.

In his study of 84 participants, he found that improvisational comedians produce 20% more product ideas and 25% more creative ideas than professional product designers. He also found that improvisational training can increase idea output for subsequent product brainstorming. While this sounds improbable, it makes sense when you consider that both creative thinking and improvisation rely on making non-obvious connections between unrelated concepts. As Barry explains, “The more I looked at humor studies, I found a lot more connections between what makes something funny and what makes something innovative.”

One of the fundamental tenets of improvisation is the concept of “Yes-And”, or the idea that you never contradict your partner and instead build on what he or she just said. For example, suppose someone says, “It’s so cold in here,” and you respond with “Seems fine to me…”, the scene starts to stall. If instead you said, “I told you it wasn’t a good idea to hide in the refrigerator,” you could start to build an interesting scene. At a fundamental level, “Yes-And” is all about forcing yourself to find interesting connections, or building associative thinking, a core creativity technique.

In our creativity and invention classes, we routinely use improvisational games as warm-up exercises to get creative juices flowing. Here are three of our favorite improv games that are not only fun, but they also build specific creative thinking patterns.

What Are You Doing?

This is an improv game that that engages both the critical and creative sides of the brain and builds associative thinking. Two people are invited onstage and given two letters of the alphabet (e.g. A and B). One player asks the other, “What are you doing?” and other player answers with an action phrase like “Arguing Baskets” and proceeds to act it out no matter how silly it appears. Then the players trade places and repeat the game.

Minion Game

This game is based on the Alternate Uses Task and is played in small groups. The group is given a simple object (like a pencil) and everyone in the group pretends to be minions who have just come across this human object. They take turns interpreting how that object might be used by humans. The trick is to not suggest a way that it is already used, like in this case for writing but for something completely different like using it as chopsticks.

Fortunately/Unfortunately

This is a fun game that builds ability to reverse direction and view things from a different perspective. This game can be played by the whole group at the same time, and everyone takes turns telling the good news and bad news in a story. The first person is given a prompt (e.g “I took out the assignment from my bag”) and he has to say a sentence that begins with the word “Fortunately” (e.g. “Fortunately, it was a very simple assignment”). The next person has to come up with the bad news and start the sentence with “Unfortunately” (e.g. “Unfortunately, it had been due the last week”) and so on.

So the next time you are running out of steam in a brainstorming session, take a break and try an improvisation game or two!

 

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Can Creativity Show the Flynn Effect?

In the 1920s, Alexander Luria, a Russian psychologist, interviewed a group of rural Russians who had been untouched with the scientific advancement of the 20th century. His goal was to understand the influence of social environment on cognitive development. What kind of thought patterns would dominate in societies where life revolved around handling tangible objects, as opposed to technical societies that induce more abstract reasoning?

A sample interview (see picture above) shows the questions and responses to a logical syllogism, posed to a rural adult. Nowadays, these kinds of deductive reasoning puzzles can be easily answered by a typical 7-8 yr old. But based on the response, it is clear that abstract, hypothetical reasoning is an alien concept to the interviewee. As Prof. James Flynn points out, “Today, we are accustomed to detaching logic from the concrete, and say “of course there would be no camels in this hypothetical German city.” The person whose life is grounded in concrete reality rather than in a world of symbols is baffled.”

The Flynn Effect, which was first documented by Prof. Flynn, is the observation that IQ has been rising steadily from one generation to the next over the last century. The reason fueling this phenomenon has been a matter of debate. While Flynn initially attributed the rise in IQ to improved nutrition, affluence and other factors, in his recent book, “Are We Getting Smarter?”, he proposes a new theory.

He now believes that the Industrial Revolution and its subsequent social changes led to the rising IQ trend. He explains in the book, “The ultimate cause of IQ gains is the Industrial Revolution. The intermediate causes are probably its social consequences, such as more formal schooling, more cognitively demanding jobs, cognitively challenging leisure, a better ratio of adults to children, richer interaction between parent and child.”

At the same time that IQ scores have been rising, another set of scores have been changing – in the opposite direction, unfortunately. Prof. Kyung Hee Kim, has been studying Creativity and its trends for several years. In a meta-analysis of creativity scores since the 1990s, Kim found that Creativity scores have been declining over the last two decades. The decline in creative thinking has affected Americans of all ages, but is especially pronounced for elementary age kids. Our focus on logical and analytical thinking certainly helped raise IQ scores, but it might have come at the expense of other thinking patterns. 

In his book, “A Whole New Mind”, Daniel Pink outlines why the 21st century will be the “Conceptual Age”, dominated by creators and empathizers. He uses three prevailing trends – Abundance (most things are not scarce anymore), Asia (work that can be outsourced, is) and Automation (linear, logical work is increasingly being handled by automation) – to make his argument that non-linear and creative thinking will become essential in the 21st century.

So, this brings us to an interesting state. On the one hand, the 21st century will place more demands on creative thinking, and on the other hand, creativity is currently on the decline. Would the cognitive demands of the Conceptual Age spur a trend of rising Creativity?

An optimistic view would be that just like Industrial Age triggered a rise in IQ, the new Conceptual age will set off a rise in creative thinking. However, the current declining trend of Creativity, should give reason to pause. Maybe the transition towards more creative work will be more challenging, than the adaptation to the industrial and scientific age.   

To address the declining creativity, Prof. Kim says, “Reversing the trend will be a process that will require patience and perseverance, because the results will not be immediate.” We will eventually find out the answer to our question, but in the meantime we can all start taking steps to influence the outcome.