Creative Genius Monday — Connect the Dots, La La La La….

I hope you guys had fun making your character profiles from last week! If you made them, I’d love to read them and see a picture ( if you drew it). You can go the post here and leave a comment.

Divergent Thinking

Divergent thinking is becoming  more important in the worlds of business, employment, and education. Traditional schools concentrate, enforce, and encourage convergent thinking. Convergent thinking is taking a problem, using resources, skills, and other attributes and arriving at a single conclusion or solution to the problem.

Now, this is fine and a wonderful skill to have. However, not everything has one solution. Some may have 2 or 50. The solution you came up with is, most likely, a good one but perhaps not the best one.

I see this all the time with my students.

When my students play piano or do something musical, they will look for one way to do something. It may be a good way to do something, it may not. When they are asked to find another solution or do it another way…..they shut down.

I got it right so I should be done

No, you got it good…but it could be better. What else could you do?

SHUTDOWN

I can almost hear a robotic power down of their brain.

They have had too much training in convergent thinking. One problem, one solution….is the mantra.

Later in life, their boss will want some divergent ways to market a product, increase sales, or find ways to cut expenses. There won’t be just one answer. This will require out of the box, divergent, creative thinking. So to encourage you here is a classic “problem” in out of the box thinking:

Divergent Thinking Exercise:

Connect all of the dots in the grid. Use just 4 lines but you can’t lift your pencil. So the lines will be connected and straight.

This is a classic and you may already see a solution. This is just to get your brain primed. We will see more of this grid and it will get even more challenging.

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About:

Jarrod home schools his kids in the Treasure Valley of Idaho. He holds two degrees in education, reads a lot, and experiments on his own children with creative education so you don’t have to. Then he reports his thoughts and findings here on the creative dad blog. He is also fond of clipboards.