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Thinking Outside The (Zwicky) Box

Fritz Zwicky, the renowned Swiss astronomer who first inferred the existence of dark matter, was well known as an original thinker who made significant contributions in many areas of astronomy. In a profile of Zwicky, aptly called Idea Man, Stephen Maurer notes, “When Fritz Zwicky died in 1974, he was remembered as a gifted observational astronomer who had discovered more supernovae than everyone else in human history combined.” What made Zwicky so successful was that he came up with a large number of discoveries and inventions during his lifetime. 

In fact, Zwicky is reported to have said about himself, “I have a good idea every two years. Give me a topic, I will give you the idea!” Zwicky invented a technique called morphological analysis, which he credits for most of his insights. He believed his technique would allow anyone to think one hundred times more efficiently. While that might seem like hyperbole, many people have since then found the technique to be a useful brainstorming tool. 

While morphology had been in use in many fields of science, Zwicky extended it to include abstract concepts and ideas. Morphological analysis works by first identifying the important dimensions of the problem, which make up the variables or parameters of the model. A Zwicky Box is then constructed where each of the parameter is placed in its own column. Different values of a parameter go into separate rows for that column. Picking a cell from each column, results in picking a unique solution to the problem. By trying out different combination of cells from the table, you can quickly and systematically explore many different solutions.

Today, a Zwicky box remains a great tool that helps in coming up with several original ideas. The Idea Box technique, outlined in Thinkertoys, and used for quickly producing thousands of new design ideas is based on the same morphological technique. Zwicky Boxes have also been used for business modeling, product design and even story planning.

As an example, suppose you want to apply the morphological technique to storywriting. You can pick a few important dimensions like “Conflict”, “Setting” and “Characters” for your Zwicky Box, each of which makes a column in the table. Then, you write down all the ideas you have for each of the columns. Now, by simply picking an entry from each column, you have the raw ingredients for your original story.

In our Creative Thinking classes, we often use Zwicky Boxes to capture and explore different ideas or to create some original story lines. We found that merely juxtaposing different elements from the table triggers the brain’s associative thinking engine to find meaningful connections, which often results in some fresh ideas.

The advantage of a Zwicky Box isn’t in building the ability to think original ideas, but in systematically exploring many ideas that can lead to surprising insights. Often times the problem isn’t necessarily coming up with ideas, it’s closing in too early on a few solutions.

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The History Behind Words

In the Greek mythological tale of Theseus and the Minotaur, Theseus sets off to battle the Minotaur, a half-man half-bull creature, who lives in the heart of the Labyrinth. As if fighting the Minotaur wasn’t a challenge in itself, Theseus’s problem is compounded by the fact that no one had ever gotten out alive from the confusing Labyrinth. To help him survive, Ariadne, Minotaur’s half sister, gives him a ball of yarn. Theseus ties one end of the yarn to the entrance of the Labyrinth, gets to the center of the Labyrinth, kills Minotaur, and uses the yarn to find his way back.

The origin of the modern-day word “clue” comes from the Greek word “clew”, which means a ball of yarn. Once you know the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, the meaning of the word “clue” becomes more or less  obvious.

Etymology, or the study of the origin of words, is a fascinating field that illuminates the meaning words through the historical stories behind it. Given that English is a potpourri of many Latin, Romance or Germanic words, an etymological analysis often helps understand the ideas behind the words and their spelling patterns. Various studies have shown that students who study English as a Foreign Language (EFL) often retain vocabulary better when it is enhanced with etymological details.

One such study found that when faced with unfamiliar idioms, students were able to use etymological information in figuring out the meaning of the idioms. The authors believe that this problem solving activity also enhances the mnemonic effect, which in turn helps with better retention. In another study, researchers found that participants who received etymological elaboration performed better in learning than the participants who just relied on rote memorization.

Word ORIGINals is a new MindAntix brainteaser that combines etymology, creativity and the mnemonic effect to aid vocabulary building. Not only does each brainteaser give the etymological information for a word, it also allows you to create your own story of how you think the word came into existence. By making your own story, you create your own memory tool rich with images and meanings that can help you remember better.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The etymologist finds the deadest words to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.” But you don’t have to just stop at discovering the picture, you can also add your own dash of color to it!

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Learning Through Mnemonics

On a visit to the Ryoyo Institute in Japan, a school that used experimental techniques to aid learning, Kenneth Higbee and his colleagues were quite impressed with what they saw. A group of kindergarteners were solving, not single digit addition problems, but quadratic equations of the form ax2 + bx + c = 0, a task that most adults find challenging!

The children were using the Yodai technique, a form of mnemonics created by Masachika Nakane, a teacher and principal at the Ryoyo Institute. Yodai, which means the “essence of structure”, uses rhymes, songs, stories and visual imagery to learn and remember the orderly steps in solving problems.   

In this particular case, the children remember the formula for solving the equation by a mnemonic called the “flute song”. Each syllable of the song corresponds to a component of the formula (see picture above). As Emmanuel Manalo explains, “The song goes as follows: fu-e-no (“flute’s”), hi-bi-ki (“sound”), wa (topic marker which means “as for the previous”, mi-mi (“ear”), hi (which means to hold the previous sound when singing), yo-a-shi (“good”). In English, the song means “As for the flute’s sound, it is good to the ear.” ”

While mnemonics don’t help in understanding the subject matter, they are a helpful aide in mastering a subject. Sometimes knowing the “how” can be a stepping stone to understanding the “why”. Scruggs and Mastropieri, advocates of using Mnemonic Instruction in classrooms, found that “students with special needs performed substantially better on content that had been instructed mnemonically (36.7% vs. 75% correct).”

Mnemonics fall into two categories – fact mnemonics (used for remembering facts and also the more commonly known form) and process mnemonics (used for remembering rules and procedures).

Fact mnemonics include techniques like

  • Keyword Method – The Keyword method is a useful tool to remember new vocabulary words. For example, to help remember a new word “barrister”, you can imagine a bear (keyword) acting like a lawyer.
  • Pegword Method – Pegwords are rhyming proxies for numbers like one is bun, two is shoe and are useful for remembering numbered or ordered information. For example, a jury of elves (“elf” being a pegword for twelve) can help students remember that juries have 12 members.
  • Letter Strategies – These include acronyms and acrostics and are useful for remembering lists. For example, “My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nachos” to remember the order of planets in the solar system.

Process mnemonics, on the other hand, help in remembering rules or procedures like the Yodai mnemonics. An example of a process mnemonic that helps to remembering the ordering of i’s and e’s  is “an i before an e, except after c or when sounded like an a as in neighbor and weigh”.  

The mNEWmonics category of MindAntix brainteaser adds a creative twist to the process of learning. The goal is to come up with a new mnemonic to help memorize a fact or a concept – either a new version of an existing mnemonic or a completely new one. 

There are advantages to making your own mnemonic.  When you create your own mnemonic, you create associations that work better for you, thereby building your own “memory tool”. Also, in the process of searching for a mnemonic, you end up revisiting the underlying content several times, further strengthening the connection.

So is there anything you wish you wouldn’t keep forgetting? Why not try making  a mnemonic  for it?

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Analogical Reasoning

In the early 1860s, when Leo Tolstoy was teaching writing to children of Russian peasants, he hit upon an interesting way to bring more creativity into the exercise. He asked his students to write a story on the proverb, “He eats with your spoon and then puts your eyes out with the handle.” The result of his exercise surprised even him.

After some initial hesitation, his students approached the challenge with an unexpected enthusiasm and produced a much better composition than the one Tolstoy had himself written. Tolstoy commented on the quality of his students’ work in an article with, “Every unprejudiced man with any feeling for art and nationality, on reading this first page written by me, and the following pages of the story written by the scholars themselves, will distinguish this page from all the others, like a fly in milk, it is so artificial, so false, and written in such a wretched style.”

While Tolstoy was simply trying to motivate his students to write with more vigor and authenticity, he accidently introduced his students to a key creative thinking skill – analogical reasoning.

Analogical reasoning is the ability to find relational similarity between two situations or phenomena. Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein in their book, Sparks of Genius, consider analogical reasoning to lie at “the heart of what it means to think creatively” and a skill that many scientists rate as the most important one to possess.

In fact, several discoveries in science can be traced back to finding the right analogy. For instance, early geneticists likened genes to beads on a string to help them understand how traits are passed along. While this simple analogy couldn’t explain everything, it did suggest possible mechanisms for inherited traits. Making analogies is a fundamental way of thinking applicable not just in science, but in almost every field like mathematics, religion and literature. Robert Frost’s metaphor of life to a journey in “The Road Not Taken” is especially powerful because of the unique associations it invokes each time.

While it’s clear that analogical thinking plays an important role in creative thinking, what exactly does it involve? Underlying analogical thinking are three mental processes – Retrieval (with a current topic in working memory, a person may be reminded of an analogous situation in long-term memory), Mapping (aligning the two situations on the relational structure and projecting inferences), and Evaluation (judging the analogy and inferences).  

The MindAntix brainteaser, Proverbial Tales, inspired by Tolstoy’s challenge to his students, aims to strengthen the mental processes used in analogical reasoning. Using proverbs from different cultures, users have to construct an original story that reflects the meaning of the proverb, forcing them to go through the different stages of retrieval, mapping and evaluation.

As Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein point out, “There is so much to be learned by analogizing that we must not neglect to learn how. Like every other tool for thinking, the capacity within ourselves and our children ought to be nurtured, exercised, trained.”

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Our First Summer Camp And Lessons Learned

We just wrapped up our first summer camp to teach children (8-12yr olds) how to think in more innovative ways. For this camp, we wanted to go beyond simply teaching creativity techniques, to having children actually design objects they use regularly. And since this is the back to school season, we picked “Redesigning School Supplies” as the theme of our camp.

We organized camp activities around a few principles and learned what works well and what doesn’t:

Don’t dumb it down

The neat thing about Creativity is that it is relatively age-agnostic – it’s easy to teach kids core creativity concepts. So, we didn’t skimp on the content. The children learned and experienced creativity techniques and design thinking processes that are typically encountered in graduate level courses.

But we did package the material to be more kid-friendly. For instance, we made a “Minion Game” for the Alternate Uses Task, where a group of minions “discover” an object and the minions take turns in interpreting how that object might be used by humans (all while speaking minion-ese, of course).

Lesson Learned: The campers grasped the concept that we were teaching quickly through play and games, although not everything went perfect. For example, we used the Minion-Game as an opening game, and realized that it wasn’t the best decision. While the kids loved the concept (they asked to play it again the next day), they hadn’t sufficiently warmed up to each other to act silly. In hindsight, this game would have probably worked much better had we scheduled for the second day or later. Our other games fared a lot better, and the children had a great time making their own Twist-a-Story skits, and Crime Scene Investigation movie trailers!

Both group and individual thinking are important

Research has shown that when people brainstorm individually and then bring their ideas to the table for group discussion, the outcome is superior compared to group brainstorming. So, our activities alternated between individual thinking and group brainstorming giving everyone a chance to think on their own.

Lesson Learned: This strategy worked out really well and we ended up with a lot of unique, interesting ideas that children were able to use in their final designs! We will definitely keep this approach going forward.

Make it Relatable

Everyday, we also studied an inventor and their creation to illustrate the concept of the day (like using empathy, making associations, or storyboarding). We also wanted to remove the the psychological barrier that children typically have –  that inventing is for adults. So our profiles included young inventors like the 11 yr old girl who invented the crayon holder, to help use up little pieces of crayon.

Lesson Learned: We are not really sure how much (or if) this inspired our campers, but the children did seem to enjoy learning about other inventors. We’ll continue using  this because it also served as a good transition activity between games and project work.

We organized the campers into four teams and each team picked a school supply to redesign. By the time camp ended we  had some interesting new products – a lunch bag that helps you plan healthy portions, a multi-functional scissors, a universal notebook that minimizes paper cuts, and a better organized and safer backpack. Not bad for the one week we had!

But most importantly, the campers had a great time figuring out their own, unique problems with the objects they picked and applying design thinking to solve them!