Day 2- SCAMPER and BrainStorming

After a LONG break since our first meeting (early release followed by a snow day), I finally got to be reunited with my OM kids!  To kick off this meeting, we created an OM contract.  Since our first meeting was just meant to have fun and get to know one another, this meeting I wanted to create a little more structure and flow.  As a team we created rules/ Dos and Don'ts that the team is supposed to follow at every meeting.  Some of the rules that the group came up with were "school-like" such as "be respectful", however some of the rules that they came up with were more OM-oriented such as "think outside of the box!"  After creating 15 rules, we all signed the contract, meaning that we read and understood all of the rules in the contract.

After the contract we dove right into some Spontaneous practice.  First, we practiced a verbal Spontaneous problem.  The problem read: Tell how you would get a wooly mammoth out of the hole. For example, you could say, " I would use a piece of rope and pull it out of the hole."  For this problem, the answers received 1 point for common answers, 3 for creative, and 5 for highly creative answers.  The students really enjoy the Spontaneous problems and gave some really interesting solutions.  Some of the more creative answers that were give were: Fill up the hole with water and let the wooly mammoth float out of the hole, bring an attractive lady-mammoth and the wooly mammoth will run out of the hole, and a play on the word hole/whole- cut the whole in half, then you would only have a half and no whole for the mammoth to be stuck in.

The kids came up with some creative answers - they are naturally creative!  However, there are some techniques that I would like to teach the students to help guide their thinking during the think-time that they are giving before having to answer.  Today, we went over the acronym SCAMPER, an idea-spurring trick to generate ideas or improve objects.  Each letter in the acronym can help students think of creative solutions to many problems.

After exploring several ways we could use each letter to help us think more creatively, we tried another verbal Spontaneous problem.  The problem we did read: We all enjoy reading about animals that are "make believe," such as the "Push-Me Pull-You" in Dr. Doolittle. Your problem is to pretend you could add something to an existing animal to make a new animal. Tell what you would add to which animal and why. For example, you could say "I would give my dog a lion’s roar, so he would be a better watchdog."

The students struggled with this one more than the first Spontaneous problem, which surprised me at first, however I realized that they were trying so hard to us SCAMPER in their thought process that it blocked their natural creativity juices from flowing.  I think as long as we keep incorporating SCAMPER into all of our Spontaneous practice, the students will start to incorporate it more naturally into their thinking, bumping up the creativity in their answers drastically.

At the end of practice today, I read the Long Term Style synopses for each of the available problems.  While I read all five problems, I told the students that for the next couple of weeks we would only be focusing of the performance problems; Seeing is Believing, The Not-So-Haunted House, and It's How We Rule.  I'm really looking forward to diving into these Long Term problems with more depth as I think the students are ready to brainstorm and think of some really creative solutions!