101 Activities For Teaching Creativity And Problem Solving

Related Activities

• Imaginary Mentor [42]

Procedure

1. Read the following to participants and ask them to respond individually:
   “Imagine you are looking at your problem through the viewfinder of a camera. Frame the picture
   and adjust the focus to view the entire problem in sharp detail. Move your mind forward or back-
   ward to adjust the focus. Add light to improve your view. Then make the image blurry to change
   perspective. Finally, add different lenses such as telephoto or wide angle to change perspectives
   again. Continue to make adjustments until your problem is centered clearly in your mind’s eye.
   Push your mental shutter-release button and allow a picture of the problem to develop in your
   mind. Study the picture and try to absorb all relevant details. Write down on your paper any inter-
   esting features such as size, shape, texture, smells, movement. Finally, examine your descriptions
   and use them to prompt ideas.”


2. Have each participant share his or her ideas, in turn, with the other group mem-
   bers, write them on Post-it®Notes (one idea per note), and place them on a flip
   chart to be evaluated later. Encourage them to consider any new ideas that might
   be prompted from others’ ideas.

Debrief/Discussion

This technique is very similar to Imaginary Mentor [42] in that participants must rely on

their visualization skills to help think of ideas. If any participants seem to struggle with

creating ideas, tell them to try “playing off” of others’ ideas. That is, let them know that

they don’t have to worry about their visualization abilities; instead, they can try to think

of other ideas based on those produced by others (of course, they still can think of their

own ideas!).

Also consider having participants debrief using the following questions:

• What was most helpful about this exercise?


• What was most challenging?


• What can we apply?


• How would you rate the value of this exercise to helping us with this issue?


• Will this exercise be helpful in the future for other sessions?


• What did you learn?


• What will we be able to use from this exercise?


• What ideas were generated, and which ones were most interesting?

200 101 Activities for Teaching Creativity and Problem Solving

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

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