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Inventor Spotlight: Sachita Ghosh

Our featured student inventor this time is Sachita Ghosh, who designed an interesting board game at one of our camps, held in collaboration with the Archimedes School. 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 Sachita talking about her idea in more detail.  

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? 

My name is Sachita Ghosh. I’m in 6th Grade Quest at Timberline Middle School in Redmond. My favorite subjects are Science and Music. During my free time I like to build puzzles and games. My dream job is to be an architect!

What is your invention and how does it work?

My invention is a board game called “Inventors and Architects”. In the game, you trade for resources such as Wood, Rock, Metal, Brick etc. Then you leverage these resources to build cities and shops, there by collecting points. In addition, there are challenge cards which give you extra points and make it more fun. These add an element of surprise in the game, making the game more interesting, and they also enable you to develop different strategies to win. 

What inspired you to develop this invention?

I used my love of games and building things to create something really fun. Leveraging 3D printing to make actual game pieces was a very creative way to put together my love of games and building.

Did your prototype work? How was that experience? 

My prototype did work. When others tried my game they said they liked it and thought it was fun and creative. That experience was one that I will never forget, because I enjoyed creating the game and then watching people have fun playing it.

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

I learned how to design an object using an online tool and then 3-D printing those objects out. I also enjoyed learning about how the 3-D printers worked. We also played several games which helped me look at games from the viewpoint of a creator. The camp taught how to be creative and think outside the box. By leveraging technology and creativity, I could create something that others could have fun with.

Who is your favorite inventor and why? 

Leonardo Da Vinci is one of my favorite inventors. His ideas were far ahead of his time and he had many varied interests from art to architecture to science to mathematics. He is truly inspiring!

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

I would really like to help solve problems related to poverty and homelessness. No one in this world should have to suffer or have problems, and I would like to come up with creative solutions to help address these problems.

How will you use your prize money? 

I plan to use this money to buy materials for my future builds. I will also put away some of it to donate to a cause.

Congratulations Sachita for winning the award! We wish you the best in your future creative endeavors.

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How Play Helps Creativity and Learning

Some of the most groundbreaking innovations didn’t get their start from a serious effort to solve a problem but from much more frivolous, playful ideas. After the first music boxes were invented, people got interested in making programmable music boxes that could play different music when the cylinder was replaced. But this basic idea – that the behaviour of a machine could be changed – became the catalyst for more serious inventions like the programmable Jacquard loom and the general purpose computer. 

Most people tend to dismiss play as childish and silly. However, a playful approach to problem solving can bring out fresh, creative ideas that may not have surfaced otherwise. Not all environments encourage play, though. 

Mitchel Resnick, Professor and Director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT, uses the metaphor of playpen vs playground to differentiate the different kinds of play they support. A playpen is a restrictive environment where children have limited opportunities to explore, whereas a playground promotes open exploration, problem solving and creativity.

So how does one create a healthy playground? Here are a few ways to promote play in student work.

Tinkering

Environments that support guided and open exploration have been found to be more effective in student learning. To allow for more tinkering, allocate time during projects for students to explore different ideas or directions to pursue, even if most of them don’t lead to any success. Similarly, allocate time for students to iterate after they have chosen an idea and started developing it more. Asking students to explain the thinking behind their ideas also helps them discover shortcomings that they can improve as they iterate. The focus during tinkering is not to judge ideas, but simply to understand and help students elaborate the idea in as much depth as possible. 

Social Interaction

Most play has a social element that allows ideas to be exchanged freely. Creating a space and time where students can explore others’ work and bounce ideas off of each other also helps in improving creativity and learning. The best ideas in a group setting tend to filter to the top and get incorporated by different teams. While this may feel like “cheating”, it’s how most innovation works in real life – by merging bits and pieces from others into your own unique creation. 

One way to increase healthy social interactions, is to teach students how to critique others’ ideas and allow them to suggest constructive improvements to other projects. When done well, this builds both social cohesiveness as well as critical thinking. 

Intrinsic Motivation

Creativity flourishes in environments that foster intrinsic motivation and suffers under extrinsic motivation. When students are intrinsically motivated they are more likely to explore and take risks. A focus on grades or scores can push students from intrinsic motivation to extrinsic motivation. Instead of external grades that evaluate project work, use self-evaluation forms so students can assess for themselves what aspect of their project could stand to improve. 

Play can be a powerful way to bring out student creativity and enhance learning. By creating a low stress environment where students can freely explore their own ideas and share with others, some of the beneficial aspects of play can be incorporated into student project work. 

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How To Build Creative Confidence

Albert Bandura, a psychologist and Professor at Stanford, who first proposed the concept of self-efficacy, discovered that people’s beliefs about themselves plays a huge role in how they feel, think and act. People with a strong belief in their abilities tend to take on more challenging tasks and persist despite failures. As Prof Bandura explained, “A strong sense of efficacy enhances human accomplishment and personal well-being in many ways. People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided. Such an efficacious outlook fosters intrinsic interest and deep engrossment in activities.”

However, self-efficacy can take some time to develop. Here are three ways to ensure students continue to build some creative confidence during the school year.  

Build Mastery 

Before students can build any confidence in an area, they first need to learn and become proficient in that area. A first grader is not going to feel confident about tackling double digit addition in mathematics, until he can easily do single digit addition. According to Bandura, building mastery is the first and the most important step in building self-efficacy. 

From a creative confidence perspective, that implies building creative thinking skills, like associative or analogical thinking, that can be used in problem solving. So starting with simple challenges that exercise the creative muscles, and give students a chance to master different creative thinking approaches can go a long way in building confidence. 

Stretch, But Attainable Goals

Before students can take on challenging tasks, they need to first feel confident about their abilities. Experiencing successes, even small ones, builds confidence whereas early failures can lead students to question their abilities. Only when students have developed a strong sense of self-efficacy, are they persevere through failures. 

To build skills and confidence, create sub goals that stretch students’ thinking a little but they are able to achieve their goals with a reasonable level of effort. For example, asking students to come up with at least one idea using a specific technique before challenging them to come up with several. However, if the goals are too easy, then students might come to expect easy successes and will not build the confidence to persevere through more challenging tasks.  

Supportive Environment

Students learn as much from others as they do independently. When students see their peers solving problems creatively, they are more inclined to believe that they have the same abilities. In a similar vein, when teachers (and others) encourage students to keep going despite setbacks and express confidence in their abilities, students start to believe in their own abilities as well. For example, if a student isn’t sure about how others might perceive their idea, let them know why you think their idea is cool and worth pursuing. 

This expectation maps to the social persuasion in Bandura’s self-efficacy model. In an encouraging environment with positive expectations, a student might conclude, “If others think I am creative, then I must be creative.”

Teaching students creative thinking techniques, setting appropriate goals and creating a positive environment and expectations as students practice problem solving, can build their creative confidence. Armed with this confidence, students will be willing to take on challenging tasks, persevere through failures, all of which will set them up for success both in the short-term as well as long-term. 

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A Simple Technique To Generate Fun, Original Ideas

Daniel Kahneman, in his groundbreaking book based on decades of his research, used the associative nature of the human brain to explain different cognitive biases that we inadvertently succumb to. The same associative aspect can also be used in understanding how our brains think creatively and how sometimes we fall into an “associative rut”, where we keep going in circles with the same few ideas.

One way to overcome the associative rut is to find a connection between completely unrelated concepts, an approach that sometimes lead to very original ideas. Another simple, yet surprisingly effective, technique to generate amusing and novel product ideas  involves making an association map.

In this approach, the idea is to connect concepts that are related but not directly. In the examples used in the study, the researchers focused mainly on sensory attributes like sight and touch, which lead to more observable incongruities. However, we found that this approach works just as well with other attributes as well. 

In this approach, you start with an initial product – the subject of your innovation – which goes in the center of the association map. From there, you branch out with a few different attributes like “used with”, “material” or “similar to” to come up with the first order of associations. Since these associations are directly related to the object, they don’t really provide a chance for incongruence or novelty. However, once you start branching out more to the second order of associations, then things get more interesting. That’s where, when you make a  connection back to the subject, it’s not very obvious but at the same time not too hard for people to find the connection reasonable. It’s the perfect Goldilocks association!

Here’s an example, using a simple classroom supply. Suppose you want to make a more interesting ruler. So you start with the ruler in the center and choose some attributes like “used with”, “material” and “similar to”. Then, you list different values for each of those attributes like the material could be plastic or wood. This gives the first order of concepts that are directly associated with the ruler. The next step is to find another set of concepts, the second order concepts, that are associated with the first order ones.  Finally, you try to connect back the second order concepts with the original object and see if that helps uncover an interesting idea. 

For example, a ruler could be made of a flexible polymer and another use case of a flexible material is a slap bracelet. By connecting the concept of a slap bracelet with a ruler, one can imagine making a slap bracelet with ruler markings which a student can wear and use as a ruler anytime they needed one. With this invention, you always have a ruler handy (pun intended) whenever you need it!

The reason that the association map works well is due to the incongruity theory. When people notice an incongruity, they can either find it amusing or be disappointed. When people can tie the incongruity back to the product then it results in an appropriate congruity and the product feels more fun, interesting or amusing, but when people can’t find an underlying connection, the product appears confusing. 

In this example, a flexible strip of plastic material connects the concepts of both the slap bracelet and the ruler. So the incongruity between a slap bracelet and a ruler just seems appropriate and fun when connected together. 

So, the next time you are trying to come up with a new product idea, instead of using the typical mindmap, try making an association map and see if that leads you to some fun, refreshing ideas. 

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Budding Inventors at the Nitzaney Ha Mada School

By Boris Serebro

(This is a guest post, contributed by one of our parents who collaborated with us to bring the “How To Be An Inventor” program in his school. Boris, not only championed to bring this in his school, he helped translate the material, coordinated with other parents, and found ways to enhance the program! It was truly a joy working with him and we are grateful for that.)

I think most of us already know that creativity and innovation are major contributors to today’s changes in the world, but not a single one of them is taught in schools. I was looking for ways to improve and freshen up the way my children learn, in order to prepare them better for a successful career and grown-up life. I happened to stumble upon a publication about this wonderful idea of “creativity is something that can be taught”, and saw the “How To Be An Inventor” course, and it fit like a glove!

The school my kids learn in, Nitzaney Ha Mada, has earned itself a reputation of a fresh and open-minded school over the last years, mainly due to the amazing work of the school director, Dorit Nadler, and her pedagogic team. They are working hard on inventing new ways to help the students reach newer heights, by bringing extracurricular activities and programs, such as  adopting a new teaching method of positive thinking and speaking the happiness language as a way of promoting personal excellence in students, and making the novel concept of “school without homework” a working example for other schools. 

So all I had to do is stitch the various pieces together. I first met with Pronita, the MindAntix founder and CEO and got her agreement. My spouse and I then met with Dorit and got her excited blessing and agreement of cooperation from the pedagogic team. Since the current staff was very busy with its own curriculum and extracurricular activities, and the fact that the material is in English, we had to gather a group of volunteering parents to teach in each of the four 4th grade classes. For all that to run smoothly, I also had to translate the material before each lesson.

Creativity Skills

The course is structured in a way that for almost half the duration students focus on learning different creativity techniques that can help them come up with interesting ideas for their inventions. Only after spending enough time with ideation, do students pick the most promising one to take further as their final invention.

Some of the creative thinking techniques that students learned were:

  • Association Map: How to use combine concepts that were one or more hops away to find product ideas that were surprising. 
  • Using Random Associations: How to combine unrelated ideas to get original and interesting ideas. 
  • Challenging Assumptions:  How to look out for hidden assumptions and reverse them to get new insights and ideas. 

Student Inventions

By the end of the course students had come up with many interesting ideas for their inventions and were excited to showcase them. Below is a small sampling of some of the neat ideas from the students:

  • A Scented Book: It’s a book that also comes with the smells of the story and upgrades the experience of reading a book. It was originally a book with lemon/orange smell to help to cope with nausea during bus rides, but the idea evolved over time.
  • Rubber Duck Vacuum: A rubber duck-shaped vacuum, to be operated by small children to help their parents.  While kids play with it, it vacuums and cleans the house. 
  • Seasonal shirt: A self-folding/ collapsible (into a small box, that can fit in a pocket) sweater for those times when the weather changes and you’re too hot / too cold. 
  • Climate control doll:The doll would detect the weather by itself and will operate its hands like a fan to cool you and even add some water splashes out of its mouth, to help you cool.
  • Juice box: A single bottle with internal compartments that allow you to store more than one type of drink, be able to drink and mix and bring it all with you on a trip.
  • An effective wake-up clock:  A clock with an arm, which is set to be activated after some time the user does not wake up (the inventor has difficulties waking up in the morning).
  • Smart closet: The closet is operated by voice commands, opens up and brings you the clothes you need with a telescopic hand. 
  • Airplane book stand: A retractable stand to help with holding an open book for reading, without the use of hands. The original intention was to help with nausea, but is also helpful in times when food is served or busy hands.

Overall Experience

The course material is very organized and contains very detailed instructions on what to teach, how to say it, how to present the examples and even how much time each part should take. So, as the teacher-parents we had confidence and a very good starting point to prepare for the lesson.

The course itself takes a methodical approach on how to teach children to be inventors. The course teaches the kids a few tools and methods to come up with new ideas. The kids were excited to learn those new methods and play with them. 

We enhanced these activities by bringing real-life examples of useful and funny inventions, to inspire the children and engage them in thinking. We also added additional examples to the course material, in order to let the children practice together before approaching the course exercises, so that they would grasp the ideas better. This was really important, as the children from various levels sit together in the same class. This was a method to bring them all closer to a more or less equal start. Another purpose of those examples was to better and graphically explain the concepts to the kids, who are used to learning from screens and powerpoint presentations. 

Some sessions took us longer than expected, despite us separating them into working groups. Some times when the students had difficulty grasping a concept, we had to adjust our pace, reinvent examples and modify methodologies (like do class reviews on peer work so that other kids would get inspired).

Later on, the course continued to show students the process of turning their creative ideas into reality. The kids got to learn about the process inventors go through, which is something we learn today only in universities, if at all.

Since some of the material was less relevant for us (for instance, our students didn’t have computers in the class to work on their online assignment), we decided to add our own material and went deeper with them on the process entrepreneurs go through. We added modern subjects such as crowdfunding, together with real-life examples of actual products that started there and became a reality.

The feedback we got from the parents and the children were amazing. First, the children would eagerly wait for this weekly lesson. The lessons are interactive, and almost all of them have some game that involves the whole class. Since this was a totally new and different material,  alongside games, this added to the excitement in the class. Second, the parents told us that “their kids always shared with them the new things they learned in the course”, and were amazed by the content and how interesting this program is.

In the end, we felt that the students learned at a much deeper level what it takes to be an inventor and had fun along the way.