101 Activities For Teaching Creativity And Problem Solving

122 101 Activities for Teaching Creativity and Problem Solving

101 Activities for Teaching Creativity and Problem Solving.Copyright © 2005 by John Wiley &

Sons, Inc. Reproduced by permission of Pfeiffer, an Imprint of Wiley. http://www.pfeiffer.com

Bi-Wordal Handout

Suppose you are an organization that wants to generate ways to increase the amount of

money it donates to community service projects. This problem involves a combination of

the words “increase” and “money.” For most people, this particular combination would

simply mean: “get more money.” Pretty simple. But it doesn’t help us think of many

ideas.

What if we now substitute a synonym for the word “increase”? We look in a hard-

bound or computer software thesaurus and look at several choices: advance, boost, jump,

raise, hike, magnify, and snowball. Then we experiment with different combinations of

these words with the word “money.” Thus, we can generate combinations such as

“boost/money,” “jump/money,” “hike/money,” and “magnify/money.”

If we can substitute synonyms for one of the words, then we also can substitute for

the other. In this case, a thesaurus provides such substitutes for the word “money” as

cash, currency, greenbacks, dough, wampum, and income. Next, we combine the word

“increase” with these words and get such combinations as “increase/greenbacks” and

“increase/wampum.”

All these combinations can stimulate ideas. For instance, we could have employees

volunteer their time to help with automobile emergencies and solicit donations from

those they help (from “boost/money”). Or we could ask artistic employees to design and

sell jewelry to raise funds (from “increase/wampum”). You get the idea.

But wait. There’s more. We don’t have to be limited to the words “increase” or

“money” in combinations. We also could use any of the other synonyms on the lists. For

instance:

Increase Money Advance Cash

Boost Currency Jump Greenbacks

Hike Dough Magnify Wampum

Snowball Income

To generate ideas on how to increase money, we select words randomly from each

column, combine them, and use the new meaning to spark ideas. That’s all there is to it.

Here are some sample ideas:

• Sponsor a walk or run where participants contribute $5 for each mile they travel
  (from “hike/cash”).


• Use payroll deductions for contributions (from “advance/income”).


• Sponsor a carnival with shell games. People bet on the outcome. The proceeds go to
  charity (from “jump/currency”).


• Give donors T-shirts with modified pictures of the denominations they contributed
  (from “magnify/greenbacks”).


• Sell snow cones and doughnuts (from “snowball/dough”).

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