The Pursuit of Tinkering

The Make Blog has an awesome post by Dan Woods on The value of a good hands on project. After observing that “Hobby, toy, and game stores” are listed as retail business currently experiencing growth (second after gas stations!), Dan attempts to explain by writing:

Perhaps it’s the constructive distraction of focusing ourselves on something other than the recession, something where we have a reasonable chance of controlling the outcome. Maybe it’s the satisfaction of picking up a new skill, dusting off an old one, or simply learning how something works (or doesn’t). Maybe it’s the memories that live long after the project is done.

And there’s definitely something intrinsically satisfying about passing along skills — even the simplest of skills — to a younger maker. What kid doesn’t enjoy a workbench, a few tools, and a good project on a rainy day?

Even though many of us are nixing the vacation we’d thought about, driving that funky clunker of a car for another year, or putting the bathroom remodel on hold, the basements, garages, and backyards of this planet are coming alive with experiments, tinkering, and the making spirit.

Apologies for the long quote, but what Dan says is just so great. Go read the full post here: The value of a good hands on project.

And after that, go pick up a kit or two for your kids at the Maker Shed Store. I’m going to pick up a Blinkybug Kit for my kids. And perhaps a Diet Coke and Mentos kit for myself…

The Psychology Today Beautiful Minds blog has a great interview with Joshua Waitzkin, the child chess wiz depicted in the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. In the interview, Waitzkin offers some interesting advice to parents on raising resilient kids:

The moment we believe that success is determined by an ingrained level of ability as opposed to resilience and hard work, we will be brittle in the face of adversity. For that reason, it is incredibly important for parents to make their feedback process related as opposed to praising or criticizing talent. Think about it-if you tell a kid that she is a winner, which a lot of well-intentioned parents do, then she learns that her winning is because of something ingrained in her. But if we win because we are a winner, then when we lose it must make us a loser.

The interview goes on to cover Waitzkin’s thoughts on life-long learning. Definitely worth reading: Conversations on Creativity with Repeat Bloomer Joshua Waitzkin

Thanks to author Tim Ferris and his Twitter stream for pointing me to the interview.

I was just reading an article from Fast Company titled Innovating with Meaning: You Reap What You Sow. The article describes the author’s belief that business performance can be enhanced by improving core competencies in creative thinking, strategic thinking, and transformational thinking among employees in support of innovation. Interesting stuff and a worthwhile article.

While I was reading it, I was struck by the thought that we may not need this type of business advice if we just did a better job of sowing the seeds of creativity in our children to begin with. Is it possible that corporations are trying to make up for our shortcomings as parents?

The article describes nine seeds of creative thinking. I’ve taken the first two and replaced business/employee language with family/child references. It really resonates with me:

Seed #1: Believe in Creativity
It is not enough for a leader parent to simply encourage “creativity” and creative thinking. Everyone must believe in their own creative thinking abilities. They Parents must also be willing to unlearn some of their old habits in order to truly participate in the innovation agenda and become an integral part of the organization’s family’s innovation engine.

Seed #2: Be Curious
The foundation of creativity is the curious mind. Without a curious mind, many great opportunities will simply slip by unnoticed. Employees Children should be encouraged to broaden their perspectives and look for ideas beyond their particular department, organization, and industry home, school and neighborhood. Innovative organizations families encourage their employees children to ask questions and challenge “the way it’s done in our industry family.” It is important to note that employees children can be encouraged to ask questions while still respecting the essence and realities of organizational familial life.

If Gordon McKenzie is correct in his observation that kids lose their ability to be creative between kindergarten and sixth grade, it seems sad that corporations are trying to then re-develop those same skills later in life.

Honestly, I’m not sure what I’m getting at with this post. As the parent of child that just entered kindergarten, my gut tells me that we need to protect her creative instincts as adamantly as we protect her safety.

What do you think?

After reading the Obama Administration Plan for Innovation, Science & Technology, Bruce Nussbaum feels that Barack Obama has a grasp on technology, but fails to “get” innovation. So what does he think Obama should do?

…he actually needs to appoint a Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) because change is as much about sociology as technology, as much about creativity as science. And that translates into more money for art and design education in K-12 and college as well as more funding for science and math.

Personally, I think Obama gets innovation. The way he ran his campaign is evidence. But that doesn’t diminish the truth of what Nussbaum writes about the importance of creativity. Here is another snippet:

It’s important to give students “high order thinking skills including inference, logic, data analysis, interpretation, forming questions and commnication,” as the Plan says. It’s also important to give students the skills of empathy, imagining, intuiting, collaborating, iterating, learning from failing, visualizing, disrupting, engaging, even playing. These are the skills of creativity and we need creativity to build a new sustainable social model of economic growth.

Good stuff. Go read the full post, Does Obama Really “Get” Innovation? Not Really., on the BusinessWeek NussbaumOnDesign blog.

Wow. Check out this post on Rich Hoeg’s eContent blog: Innovation After Kindergarten. In it, he references some great info from IDEO General Manger and author Tom Kelley. Here’s a snippet:

“Tom Kelley reviewed the works of an artist named Gordon McKenzie. This artist visited a school and spent time with each class from grades K through six. When he asked the kindergartners how many of them were artists … almost every hand went up. By the time he got to the sixth grade and asked the same question, only two hands went up. Somewhere in the intervening six years the children had learned how not to be creative … but instead looked around the classroom and sought their peer’s approval.”

Rich adds to this with his own observation:

“As a coach of Lego Robotics for the pas six years, I learned the same lessons. While the designs from the Minnesota H.S. robotics teams are robust, when it comes to creativity every coach knows one must visit the elementary school competitions. The younger children have not yet been taught what does not yet work. They experiment.”

With a daughter currently in kindergarten, and another set to begin in fall 2010, this is powerful and scary stuff…

Discovery Education is running an ‘Inspiring Invention‘ contest. School-aged entrants create a public service announcement that motivates other K-12 students to get inspired and start inventing. It’ll be fun to see the results.

For us parents, It’d be fun to see a similar contest where we’re asked:

1. How do we create an environment/tools to help our kids be inventive.

2. How do we nurture/encourage our children without influencing their ideas.

I’m constantly struggling with both.

In the last week or so we decided to try something new at home. We had a 6′ roll of white paper laying around for years - can’t remember where we got it. We started using the paper to cover our dinner table, similar to the pizza restaurant down the street. The bowl in the center of the table, the one that used to hold apples and oranges, is now filled with markers and crayons. The paper stay on the table for three or four days at a time, and the kids are able to draw whenever the mood strikes them. It has made dinner time lots of fun. Also makes it possible for the kids to be creative anytime - they don’t need us to get supplies out for them. Added bonus: the art covers our old, junky table and really brightens up the room.