Design Think: Ideation game for kids
What makes you creative? What triggers ideas in oneself? How to train your child to think out of the box?
“geniuses are geniuses because they form more novel combinations than the merely talented” —Scientific Genius(book), psychologist Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California at Davis
Intelligo, the root of intelligence, means to “select among.”
Hanging on to this idea, I created an ideation kit. Let’s call it “Design Think”.
Design Think is a tangible outdoor game to enhance the skill of ideation based on the fundamental of “making more novel combinations”.
What is ideation? Have you heard about Design Thinking?
Ideation, in general, is generating ideas with a specific context in mind. Ideas could be anything, just anything, without any constraints. This is apart from how it can be further coupled with other skills to be a phenomenal out-of-the-box thinker. Other skills are to empathise, to define, to ideate, to prototype and to test.
This kit is an attempt to enhance the third skill.
“In France, in 1818, a nine-year-old boy accidentally blinded himself with a hole puncher while helping his father make horse harnesses. A few years later the boy was sitting in the yard thinking about his inability to read and write when a friend handed him a pinecone. He ran his fingers over the cone and noted the tiny differences between the scales. He conceptually blended the feel of different pinecone scales with reading and writing, and realized he could create an alphabet of raised dots on paper so the blind could feel and read what was written with it. In this way Louis Braille opened up a whole new world for the blind. Braille made a creative connection between a pinecone and reading. When you make a connection between two unrelated subjects, your imagination will leap to fill the gaps and form a whole in order to make sense of it. It is this willingness to use your imagination to fill in the gaps that produces the unpredictable idea. This is why Einstein claimed that imagination is more important than knowledge.” — Michael Michalko
How exactly did I think around to create this game? It started with understanding the space, ambience and tone of a classroom full of kids.
Combining multiple layers of information and the aura in schools as of today, I made a list of ‘must haves’ in the game.
Additionally, there were few factors which could be incorporated depending on the availability of resources and the age group of students.
Finally, you see the picture of one of our prototypes. It was named Think out of the box.
I created many more prototypes and then tested the final one.
Have a look(video) at the results of the testing phase here.
To see exactly what this game is, you will have to wait a little more.
I will be updating it soon on my website.
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Design think eventually was re-named as Bulby: become genius.
How beautifully little things make our world!
Have a wonderful day. Keep designing. Keep living. #roundumbrella
