April 21st 2024 is World Creativity and Innovation Day and I wanted to share my experiences, from the last year, of developing children’s creativity and innovation through cardboard engineering. My role this year has been teaching Technology and Engineering, with a focus on Sustainability and developing creativity and innovation, across Primary 5, 6 and 7.
I was given a room to work in which has become our schools ‘STEM Innovation Hub’, a room where children come once a week to be creative and innovative; to have a chance to explore and express their ideas. We also set up a ‘STEM Creativity Hub’ for the younger children where much the same happens.
Creativity and Innovation
Creativity can be defined as the ability to produce or develop original pieces of work, techniques or thoughts in a particular field, although often it is about making connections between different areas and bringing them together.
Innovation is about the practical implementation of an idea that results in the development of something new. For me it’s about taking a creative idea and working out how to turn it into something real, a product, a model or a design.
Creativity and innovation don’t come from nowhere, children aren’t born creative, and to be useful they can’t exist in isolation. Creativity and innovation are at the core of every field of expertise, whether it is the arts, sport, cooking or the STEM subjects.
Developing Creativity and Innovation
Children’s creativity and innovation can be developed and improved if they are given the right opportunities and enough freedom to explore and experiment. There are three areas to consider:
Environment
The starting point for developing creativity and innovation is creating an environment in class where children are happy to experiment, discuss their ideas, collaborate and make mistakes.
We work collaboratively all the time in class with children having to discuss their ideas, listen to others, compromise, experiment, evaluate and improve. It’s taken time to embed the processes and make sure children feel secure sharing, discussing and debating ideas – but now they get annoyed when they don’t get those opportunities.
Knowledge and Skills
A certain level of experience is needed as a starting point for children to be creative. Whether it’s experience that they bring with them into class or knowledge that you share with them children need something to start from.
When we started the cardboard engineering there was some basic knowledge about different types of cardboard that the children needed and there were a number of basic skills that it was necessary to teach the children first. We recapped the importance of measuring and cutting accurately and then explored 4 basic cardboard joining techniques through a structured process; slots, tabs, flanges and braces.
Opportunities
Once the children had the basic knowledge and skills to work with the cardboard it was then about creating open opportunities for them to be creative. The brief they were given was very loose to allow them as much freedom to be creative as possible. They were to use the skills they had learnt, along with others they picked up along the way to build a desk tidy to use in class.
I took a step back and only supported when asked to. It was great to see children embracing the freedom to come up with a whole range of creative ideas. They were learning from each other, trying things out, making changes, solving problems and from the basic knowledge and skills they started with you could see them develop themselves further through the process.
The Process
From then on it has been about following the same process. Teaching children the basic skills in whatever medium they are going to work, woodwork, Modroc modelling, electronics, Lego or K’Nex and then giving them an open brief or challenge and letting them work through the design process being as creative as possible.
Further Opportunities
We gave the children a number of additional creative thinking design opportunities too, taking part in the Primary Engineers Leaders Award, Make it Happen and the Aerospace Kinross Schools Air Race Challenge. All of the opportunities gave the children an open brief to be creative and innovative building on their prior knowledge.