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Inventor Spotlight: Pahal Sah

Our featured student inventor is Pahal Sah, who created a more useful backpack. Her idea won a national level award as part of the “Student Ideas for a Better America” competition organized by the National Museum of Education. 

Here is Pahal talking about her invention in more detail.  

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? 

Hi! I’m Pahal Sah, a 5th Grade Quest student at Albert Einstein Elementary. I love reading books about mystery and fiction, arts and crafts, playing board games, and playing with friends! My favorite subjects are Reading and Social Studies, mainly because of the fun projects we have.

What is your invention and how does it work?

My Invention is the Fluffy Carrier 9000, and it is a backpack, a normal one, but with a few extra features. One of them is the wheels and handle, like a suitcase. Whenever you pull the handle, wheels pop out of the bottom. I also added an expandable pocket in the middle, and if you unstrap it, the other side turns into a blanket! There are many pockets for school supplies, and another great part is that the backpack itself is waterproof.  

What inspired you to develop this invention?

Two problems inspired me – how wet backpacks got during rainy days, and that most of the time I couldn’t fit all my supplies in my bag at school. It was a real pain carrying my water bottle, folder, and lunchbox while trying to board a bus.

Did your prototype work? How was that experience? 

Yes, my prototype worked! I made a bag using construction paper; the hardest part was shaping it. I’m pretty sure I used some cardboard for the base, and I decorated it with even more “pockets”. For the wheel, I taped a small circle and the handle, I used a piece of construction paper to sort that out. I was very happy at the end when my prototype looked like an actual backpack! 

What are some things you learned from your MindAntix camp that will help you in the future? 

To think out of the box and to be creative. Later, I will have to make my own ideas not copy them from other people. I really loved how we were supposed to make our own inventions! 

Who is your favorite inventor and why? 

I don’t really have a favorite inventor. All the inventors stand out to me!

What kind of problems do you want to solve in the future?

In the future, I want to solve the problems that are affecting nature such as Global Warming, helping save endangered animals, and more. 

How will you use your prize money? 

I actually haven’t thought about that…maybe to get something I really want? Or maybe I could use it to get a new game or book!

Congratulations Pahal for winning the award! We hope to see you solve bigger challenges in the future.

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Inventor Spotlight: Manan Ghosh

Our featured student inventor is Manan Ghosh, who designed an interesting board game. His idea won a national level award as part of the “Student Ideas for a Better America” competition organized by the National Museum of Education. 

Here is Manan talking about his game in more detail.  

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? 

My name is Manan Ghosh. I’m in 5th Grade Quest at Ella Baker Elementary School in Redmond. My favorite subjects are Science and Math. During my free time I like to play Minecraft and build items in Paint 3D that I can use in Minecraft. My dream job is to be a scientist.

What is your invention and how does it work?

My invention is a board game called “Castles at Battle”. In the game, you move your pawn across the board to collect  resources such as Wood, Rock, Metal and Bricks. You then use these resources to build parts of your castle that then do battle with each other. As part of this, you can enhance the defenses of your castle by adding  things like Walls, Towers and Drawbridges, using the resources that you have collected. Resources also let you attack your opponent’s castles by buying attacks, like Knight Attack and Archer Attack. It is a game of moves and countermoves, as you try to get enough resources to defend your own castle while also collecting resources to attack your opponent. You win if you eliminate all other players, this is done by sending out an attack that deals more attack points then the defense points of the other castle.

What inspired you to develop this invention?

I like games involving war and when you have to focus on more than one thing to win. Making 3-D models of castles, walls and towers was a lot of fun and made playing the game more real.

Did your prototype work? How was that experience? 

I could not finish my prototype though I did make some of the 3D printed items for my game. Since it was my first time doing 3D printing and my game pieces were a bit complex, it took me more time than I expected. It was still a lot of fun.

What are some things you learned from your MindAntix camp that will help you in the future? 

I learned how to design 3D objects using new tools and print them. I have played board games, but it is different to think about board games from the point of view of the designer. You have to think about different things.

Who is your favorite inventor and why? 

Leonardo Da Vinci is my favorite inventor. He was an artist and also made many inventions in various fields.

What kind of problems do you want to solve in the future?

I would like to find ways to solve the problem of too much plastic and pollution in the oceans.

How will you use your prize money? 

I will save my money until I find some good use for it.

Congratulations Manan for winning the award! We hope you enjoy playing your board game with your friends and family.

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The Educational Challenge For This Decade: A Story In Two Graphs

As we start the new decade and move towards the post-pandemic phase with cautious optimism, the question of how education needs to evolve is still looming. The pandemic shone a light on challenges like the magnitude of inequity in our society, but it also became a catalyst for better technology adoption in schools. Without technology platforms that made remote learning feasible, it is scary to imagine what last year could have looked like. 

However, the role technology has played in education so far has been to enable the same teaching that took place in person to occur in remote settings – it hasn’t really transformed education in deeper ways. But transformation is what’s really needed to address underlying issues.

The problem with our current educational system has been in the making for several decades – we are simply not adapting fast enough to keep up with the technological progress. The gap between skills that students acquire in schools and skills that are needed in the workforce continues to widen. 

Jonathan Rochelle, who started the Google Apps for Education team, captured the essence of the problem we face in education today. While comparing the progress we have made in machine learning to human learning, he quipped “we are teaching machines to be more like humans and we are teaching humans to be more like machines.” 

Is Creativity The New STEM?

The impact machine learning is having on human livelihood brings us to the first graph (Fig. 1). 

Research by economists Henry Siu and Nir Jaimovich shows that economic growth over the last two decades has come entirely from non-routine, or creative jobs. Routine work – both manual and cognitive – has been steadily declining due to automation. Machines learning is getting better at increasingly complex tasks, performing them with fewer errors compared to humans. 

We are teaching machines to be more like humans, and we are doing that quite well. 

As a side note, the graph also shows that every recession accelerates the decline in routine work, and in a few years we will learn the full impact of covid on long-term job trends.

The current situation is reminiscent of the early 2000s when various reports (e.g. Rising Above the Gathering Storm) raised concerns about the quality of math and science education, and the shortage in the STEM workforce to meet the growing demand. 

In response to that Obama, who had earlier called STEM education our “Sputnik” moment, announced incentives for schools that create STEM programs for their students in his 2013 State of the Union address. That triggered an intense focus on STEM education from many players including schools, nonprofits and the technology industry. These efforts have paid off to an extent. Access to coding and other STEM programs is much more easily available to students of all age groups and backgrounds now. There are indications that although we have a scarcity of STEM graduates in certain geographical areas and domains, we also have a surplus in others. 

We are yet again at a junction where economic forecasts are pointing to the need for a skill that isn’t being adequately addressed. It’s likely that Creativity is the STEM of this decade. 

The Decline of Student Creativity

How well students are doing in their creative thinking abilities brings us to the sobering reality of our second graph (Fig. 2). 

Professor Kyung Hee Kim first discovered that student creativity as measured by the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) has been declining since the 1990s and her analysis led to the highly popular Newsweek article, The Creativity Crisis. She found that measures like originality (thinking of novel ideas) and fluency (thinking of several ideas) – the hallmark of creativity – have shown a significant decline over the years. 

Part of the reason for this decline, according to Prof. Kim, has been the heavy and narrow focus on standardized testing which doesn’t leave room for building higher order thinking skills. Learning in school heavily prioritizes “one right answer”, which machines are good at, as opposed to multiple possible solutions, which give students the opportunity to exercise their creative muscle. Or as Sir Ken Robinson expressed, “we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”

Current EdTech tools used in schools aren’t helping either – they primarily help students express their creativity instead of building it. 

In other words, we are teaching humans to be more like machines, and unfortunately, we are doing that quite well too.  

Navigating the Skill Gap

Educators have long recognized the importance of fostering creativity as part of student learning but the current economic environment is making this an urgent need. 

The good news is that creativity is a cognitive skill that can be developed with practice, and cognitive creativity programs have shown promising results. 

The not-so-good news is that most focus on divergent thinking which is disconnected from academic content students are learning. As one study pointed out, “It is hard to see how listing 100 interesting and unusual ways to use egg cartons will help Johnny improve his scores on state-mandated achievement tests.” 

One approach taken at MindAntix is to identify thought patterns, like associative or reverse thinking, that aid in creative thinking and actively incorporate them into school curriculum. Other educational approaches, some of them domain specific, have also been effective in improving creativity which offers room for some optimism. 

If we start teaching humans to be better at what makes us uniquely human – our ability to think creatively – we stand a much better chance at improving educational and career outcomes for our students. 

This article first appeared on edCircuit.

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Creativity In Education: Reflections From ISTE 2020

The ISTE conference, one of the largest in the edTech space, concluded earlier this month after the pandemic delayed it from its regular summer schedule. Apart from presenting our approach to creativity this year, I was also interested in learning about tools and techniques educators are using to foster creativity among their students. 

Overall, I found it heartening that educators are increasingly recognizing the importance of creativity and discovering ways to nurture it in their students. Creativity is a crucial 21st century skill. Unlike linear and sequential thinking, creativity relies on non-linear processes making it hard for AI to automate. This is one of the main reasons why creativity is now the most sought after skill among employers. 

EdTech tools, on the other hand, haven’t progressed much in improving student creativity.   

(A quick note – while I looked at several different sessions related to creativity, this is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis as there were several hundred sessions this year.)

What is Creativity?

One of my first observations after watching several sessions related to creativity was that most educators use creativity as a proxy for open ended projects where students have freedom to express themselves. While this is clearly better than assigning work with one right answer, it’s not sufficient.

Simply giving students the space to be creative doesn’t necessarily equip them with the skills to think creatively. What students produce may or may not be creative, and can only be assessed by digging deeper into student created artifacts. 

As a result, most educators and students have built misconceptions around creativity.

So, what really is creativity? Creativity as psychologists define it is the ability to come up with ideas that are both novel and useful. An idea that looks original but doesn’t solve a problem or is appropriate in a situation is simply imaginative, not creative. Similarly, if the idea solves a problem but has already been done by others is useful but not creative. 

There are several models of the creative process and at a high level we can think of it as two phases – coming up with the initial creative idea followed by expressing the idea and iterating if needed.

Do EdTech tools help or hinder creativity?

All of the EdTech tools I saw – which included products from Google, Microsoft and Adobe – were geared towards helping students better express their creative idea but didn’t play a role in enabling creative thinking. In that sense, they don’t really help build creativity.

That said, they can potentially hinder creativity in some cases. One of the problems in using digital tools too early in the process is that students end up producing work that looks very polished but isn’t backed up with deep thinking. Students might rush into creating the final product without spending sufficient time exploring and examining different ideas, leading to sub-par results. 

This doesn’t mean that these tools shouldn’t have a role in the classroom. These tools are great for building digital literacy, acquiring knowledge and collaborating with others. But, as far as creativity is concerned, we need to be mindful about how to use them in the overall workflow. 

How are educators fostering creativity?

I saw several examples of educators using digital tools in interesting ways to teach content to students. However, those approaches fall into the category of “teaching creatively” instead of “teaching for creativity”. Teaching creatively implies finding novel ways to make teaching more effective and engaging, but it doesn’t help build student creativity. Teaching for creativity, on the other hand, is to teach in ways that help students build their own creativity. 

Some educators have made teaching for creativity a core part of the student experience. Here are some examples:

  • Visual Thinking: Using sketches and doodling is a way to not just express ideas but to think. Sketchnoting can help students find connections between different concepts and build personal meaning. Manuel Herrera got inspired to use visual thinking after attending a design conference. He realized that not a single speaker at the design conference talked about any tools. Instead, the conference was all about the creative process before any tools are used. That influenced him to start using a visual thinking process with his students. One of his techniques is to ask students to fold a sheet of paper in eight sections for brainstorming. Students then take 30 seconds to sketch an idea in one section and then quickly move on to the next one. He found that when students get to the fourth or fifth idea, they start coming up with more original and interesting ideas.
  • STEAM Mindset: Tim Needles shared how he encourages the STEAM mindset which centers around creativity, failure, curiosity, design and fun. After working on many projects he has realized that the process is more important than the product – even if students don’t have a successful piece they still learn through the process. One of his techniques to spur creativity is to introduce a constraint which forces students to think in different directions. For example, in one project he asked students to create an untraditional selfie using a different material. Students  responded with creative self portraits made out of skittles, cheetos or leaves. 
  • Creative Thought Processes: Our own work on building creativity relies on identifying thought processes like associative or reverse thinking, that underlie creative thinking, and incorporating them in the process. This year I presented some fun warm-up games that can be used standalone as brain breaks or incorporated into what students are already learning (see resources here). For example, one game asks students to reverse an assumption and find a scenario where the reversal would make sense. One group of students who challenged the assumption that tables have legs, came up with a table design that can be lowered from the ceiling. Students often find that by challenging assumptions they can come up with radical insights.  

The future of creativity in education

Given the economic trends and forecasts, the role of creativity in education is only going to grow more. Current edTech tools allow students to express their creativity more efficiently, but don’t help build it. This leaves the job of improving student creativity to educators who are filling this gap through different creative processes. This doesn’t mean that EdTech tools can’t improve creativity. It is highly likely that as these tools evolve to incorporate creativity building elements, they will make a much bigger impact on student learning and creativity.

This post first appeared on edCircuit. 

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Creativity Through The Lens of Evolutionary Biology

Understanding how we, as humans, think and behave has always held fascination for scientists. Creativity – the ability to think of novel and useful ideas – is often considered a key trait that has allowed us to flourish as a species. Evolutionary biology dictates that traits beneficial to the species as a whole survive in the long term, while the less useful traits die down. 

So, in what ways is creativity beneficial to us?

Research of innovation in other birds and animals provides clues that creativity evolved when brains developed more, and it provided distinct survival advantages. 

One example found in nature is the bowerbird, one of nature’s creative engineers. Bowerbirds, found natively in Australia and New Guinea, have an interesting courtship and mating ritual. The male bowerbirds build elaborate structures called bowers from sticks and vegetation, and then decorate them with brightly colored objects like shells, stones, flowers or berries. 

When scientists looked at the complexity of the bower, which indicates higher intelligence and creativity, and the brain size they found an interesting correlation. Bowerbird species that built more complex bowers also had a larger cerebellum volume. 

Similar research on birds and primates confirm the hypothesis that more advanced brain structures developed to allow more complex cognition, which conferred evolutionary advantages. In a metastudy of birds and primates, researchers developed an innovation index by coding documented innovative behaviors and found that higher innovation levels correlated with larger brain sizes. 

Two main aspects of cognition that have to work together to support adaptability are innovation and social learning. 

Innovation

The ability to innovate plays a crucial role for a species in its survival. When faced with a new environment, species that are able to discover new food sources, avoid new predators or adapt to a different weather have significant advantages over those that don’t. One example of innovation in adapting to new foods comes from black rats that occupied the Jerusalem pine forests. The only source of food appropriate for the black rats in that area are pine seeds. The rats developed a technique to strip the pine cone to reach the seed, a behavior they had not previously used, which was critical for them to survive in the new habitat.  

Social Learning

While discovering a new food source or developing a new tool to extract hard to reach foods can help an animal survive a new environment, the species as a whole can only benefit when animals can learn from each other. Using the earlier example of black rats, scientists found that black rat pups were able to learn the new pine stripping behavior from their mothers, while other adults were not always successful in learning through observation. This successful transmission of learning from mothers to their pups allowed the black rats to flourish in the new environment. 

Our own history offers numerous examples of successful innovations that were exchanged and adopted by others. Our ability to think creatively and learn from others have allowed us to thrive in new environments. As one of the research studies summarized, “The combination of innovation with social learning, as documented in a number of primate species, is likely to be especially advantageous for species in novel habitats, as it could allow copying exploratory behavior per se as well as permitting the rapid transmission of successful strategies.”