The Most Important Problem Solving Tool Is Within Us And Here’s What Neurochemistry Tells Us About It

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The Top 3 21st Century Skills Employers Want:

Along with leadership, initiative and collaborative skills, creativity is the quality that finds unique solutions to rare or persistent problems. Its provides originality and adaptability in a changing terrain called life.

At Future STRONG, we constantly ask ourselves what prevents humans from soaring and reaching their highest potential. The Purple in our Logo stands for Creativity and Productivity. Because technology is here to stay, we must also empower our children with what makes them uniquely human – compassion, creativity and a clarity of purpose.

After all, here are top three 21st Century Skills that Colleges and Employers want: Perseverance, Creativity, Adaptability.

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Defining And Understanding Creativity:

Creativity is nothing but the generation of novel and meaningful ideas. The definition, however, doesn’t mean that every odd and random thought can be labeled as creativity. At the same time, new ideas, their connections to our old beliefs and facts can also be explored and put forward.

Creativity comes from silence, stillness and surrender. Creativity is the skill that gives us a license to wonder and be imaginative. And creativity that builds on our inherent curiosity can be a great motivating factor. When you allow yourself to be creatively free, many solutions along the path of discovery open up.

Creativity is to embrace what life throws at us in order to problem solve for ourselves and those around us. We must begin by embracing everything – experiences, challenges, limitations and loss.

Only when we are willing to be curious and exploring, we can generate a few good ideas out of a ton of bad ones. And that’s one of the key elements of creativity. The fluency with which we generate ideas, good or bad. Then comes the flexibility – the range and variety of ideas. And the originality of the idea.

In the Art Of Thought, author Graham Wallas says – Development of insight follows a four stage progression:
Preparation, incubation, illumination, verification. This kind of mindset doesn’t thrive in poverty. That’s where this art of thought meets the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

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You gotta scare the crap out of yourself on a daily basis. You don’t get to be large by doing the things you’re already doing. ~ Jen Sincero.

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The Neuroscience Of Creativity:

Our individual creativity depends on our cognitive, motoric, perceptual, attentional and motivational capabilities. And the greater we nurture these capabilities, the greater we become at creativity.

The neuroscience research done by Roger Beaty and his team on cognitive neuroscience of creative thinking had resulted in the development of a map of the creative brain.

“The map of the creative brain consisted of strong communication between the two brain networks discussed earlier that in most people work in opposition: the default network (associated with mental simulation, perspective taking, aesthetic experience, meaning-making, and construction of the self) and the executive attention network (associated with concentration, working memory, and inhibiting potentially distracting information).”

It also shows that in creativity mode, the above two networks communicate well with the salience network. The salience network tags information that’s generated by the default network as relevant or not to the current idea and then passes that information to the executive attention network for further conscious reflection.

Come to think of it, creators can work with three brain networks at the same time. They can put their whole selves to work, flexibly switching between —the rational and the irrational, the emotional and the logical, the deliberate and the intuitive, and the imaginative and the abstract.

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The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. ~ Ernest Becker

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Encouraging Children To Become Curious Creators:

When children create, they surrender to their ideas and don’t inhibit the flow with their inner negative chatter. They innovate from within the deep pockets of silence and stillness in their minds.

We are a maker space at FutureSTRONG Academy. Our projects are chaotic because our children are creatives. Our purpose with creating a makerspace is to give little minds an opportunity to explore their strengths and their interests. With our makerspace studio, we create a collaborative environment where children can make, explore and share their ideas.

Our way of teaching is designed to empower children to seek their own answers. Instead of settling for whatever someone else thinks is the best, children learn through meta cognition – constant practice and feedback.
P.S. No high tech tools needed.

Ask them to use their imagination or inspiration to generate new product ideas. And watch them become master problem solvers and collaborators by designing, building, and iterating on prototypes.

Creativity At Its Best Meme

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Product Ideation, Design Thinking And Much More:

Design thinking is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.

For encouraging design thinking it is good to introduce kids to tools like TinkerCad. The site helps students create in 3 dimensions and is a great way to develop student understanding of length, width, and height. Students learn how to combine and identify different 3D shapes, while learning about angles. Tools like Tinkercad are the best ways to work at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy: Creating.

Bloom’s Taxonomy © Vanderbilt University Center Of Teaching

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Boost Creativity Through Boredom:

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Problem Solvers Who Prioritize Process Skills:

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Questions, just ask!

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