Creativity takes courage!

This year we are trialing a new Makerspace course in Year 9. Prior to starting this I'd done lots of reading and research but there's nothing like the real thing to learn from!

So far this term, I've been setting challenges and teaching skills around using the resources we have. A lot of the learning has incorporated exploring learning competencies such as collaboration and critical thinking rather than focusing on content knowledge.

Last week we focused on the learning competency of creativity and discussed why creative thinking encourages deep learning. So this week I decided to loosen the reins a bit and let the students loose on the resources. We talked about how the best creations come out of a personal interest or motivation, or out of a desire to solve a problem. We talked about how 'problems' could be as simple as being bored and that a creation might be something to solve that problem. We also discussed how coming up with ideas is often the hardest part of being creative and shared some strategies for developing creative ideas. I used Matisse's famous quote - "Creativity takes courage" as a discussion point also. We talked about how being creative often requires us to step outside our comfort zone and try something different.

I was so impressed by the ideas the students came up with and the motivation they showed in the first session today, because they were pursuing an idea they had come up with without limitations of sticking to a subject area or specified criteria. The only criteria was that they needed to be 'creative'. 

Here are some examples of what the students started today: 

There were groups working on making a cartoon, games in Scratch, setting each other engineering challenges, creating art works with re-purposed materials such as old books and Styrofoam, creating a real-life film of a popular computer game.

I look forward to sharing the progress the students make in developing their creative products.