Week 4: Brainstorming

Brainstorming

This week in gifted class the main focus was on brainstorming what this year's 3D object was going to be.  Every year in the elementary gifted program the classes have collaborated to produce a 3D object that fits in with the year's theme.  This year's theme is invention.  Here are some of the past year's themes and the 3D objects that students have built.

Year	Theme	3D object
2011/12	Games	3D Game Table
2010/11	deBono’s 6 Thinking Hats	Giant Hat
2009/08	Water	Submarine
2008/07	Time	Time Machine

Prior to brainstorming we talked about the DOVE technique:
D  defer judgement -- judging slows the creative process, can shut people down
O  oddball / original -- spurs on other interesting ideas
V  vast number -- allows us a lot to choose from
E  expand / elaborate -- most good ideas are built on previous ideas

Here is a word cloud showing some of the terms students brainstormed.

Over the next week or so I will be sifting through all of the wonderful ideas generated to come up with a starting point for our project. 

Hockey Cards

Students started working on 'hockey' cards featuring themselves.  In addition to giving students the opportunity to share some information about themselves it also gets students to work on computer skills such as properly editing and saving documents.  Some of the classes will be using the hockey card format to create cards for various famous inventors. 

For Fun

It was great fun watching student reactions to the following video of an intricate Rube Goldberg machine.

We also looked at this puzzle, though I'm not sure that puzzle is the correct term.  How many F's do you see in the following sentence?  Ask your child for the correct answer or check back here next week ;-)

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE-
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF-
IC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.