Reading Reaction 4
Tom Wujec made famous a simple design challenge which morphed into a worldwide phenomenon. Actually, Tom borrowed the idea from Peter Skillman, which asks participants to build the largest free-standing structure with only twenty sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. Over the course of many marshmallow challenges, Tom has seen some astounding results. In fact, the most dramatic results were from those who seem to perform best on these types of challenges. Notably, it is not business managers, corporate leaders, lawyers, teachers, or engineers, but kids between the ages of four and six. So, what is at the heart of kindergarten-age students outperforming adults with so many more years …show more content…
Conversely, adults are limited by years of programmed answers, boundaries, limitations, and pre-set attributes on how to build or construct objects. The younger students draw from their imagination, while the older participants look for ideas which are seen as the most popular. So, the good news is, our younger students have an innate ability to naturally generate ideas “outside” the normative constraints most adults experience when creativity is introduced. The bad news is, schools historically have taught from a set of boxed ideas and strategies, so young students’ creativity, innovation, and progressive thinking are quickly replaced with, “this is how we do …show more content…
128). The results document a pronounced decline in being able to elaborate on ideas, generate original ideas, and open-minded to new experiences. Further, the study found the creativity scores for K-6 declined more than any other age group. Conversely, an analysis of fourteen studies on children’s “pretend play” showed a dramatic increase in children’s imagination during pretend play during the years between 1985 – 2008. (Gardner & Davis, 2013) conducted their own investigation into changes in creativity with middle and high school students for the years 1990 and 2011. Interestingly, (Gardner & Davis, 2013) chose to analyze 354 actual artistic productions (e.g. short stories and visual art) to better evaluate the naturalistic view into young people’s creative process (p. 130). Results indicate a distinction between visual art and the written word. Over time, visual art has been found to become less conventional, while creative writing as become more so (p. 135). Lastly, one area of distinction came from current art teachers and Camp directors. Art teachers report students’ difficulty with coming up with their own ideas, and often find the students struggle with executing ideas without the use of some type of assistance (e.g. App). Camp directors had similar conclusions based on the traditional