===Sugar Digest===
I encourage you to join two threads on the Education List this week:
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005382.html, which
has boiled down to an instruction vs construction debate; and
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005342.html, which
has boiled down to a debate of catering to local culture vs the
Enlightenment. I encourage you to join these discussions.
Rather than commenting here, I want to discuss a third, orthogonal
topic: creativity. I hosted a visit to Cambridge this week from Diego
Uribe, a Chilean researcher who is currently a Fulbright scholar at
the International Center for Studies in Creativity in Buffalo, NY.
Diego challenged me with two questions: Can we be more deliberate in
developing children's creativity skills and how can we use Sugar to
better disseminate creativity heuristics?
Diego is of the believe that creativity is a skill that can be taught;
there has been more than 50 years of research into how to teach this
skill; and yet creativity is rarely a deliberate part of mainstream
education.
Diego introduced me to Grace Hopper's formula for creativity that I
had not previously encountered: The probability of creativity is a
function of knowledge, innovation, and experience, modulated by
attitude. (Historical footnote: Hopper is the one who coined the term
debugging when her colleagues found a moth stuck in a relay of the
Mark II computer.) In this formulation, attitude is often the weak
link.
Central to his own vision of teaching creativity as a skill is the
ability to strike the proper balance between divergent and convergent
thinking.
Guidelines for divergent thinking
* defer judgment
* go for quantity
* make connections
* seek novelty
Guidelines for convergent thinking
* apply affirmative judgment
* keep novelty alive
* check your objectives
* stay focused
(I was reminded of David Reed's analogy to water and ice: innovation
occurs in its liquid phase; consolidation in its solid phase.)
Diego was preaching to the choir. When I was director of the Media
Lab, I never told the students or faculty what to work on—their ideas
were always much better than mine—but I did insist on a creative
(learning) process that I described in a paper, The seven secrets of
the Media Lab.
blockquote
The phases of the moon represent the cyclical process of innovation at
the Media Lab. In the 1980s we used to describe the first phase of the
innovation cycle as ‘demo or die’. John Maeda rephrased our mantra in
the late 1990s to be ‘imagine and realize’. Indeed, it is a violation
of our cultural norm to have an idea and not build a prototype — in
large part because of our deeply-held belief that we learn through
expressing. Building a prototype also enables us to advance to the
second phase of the innovation cycle — critique. The Lab, which has
its origins in architecture (the founder of the Media Lab, Nicholas
Negroponte, is an architect) draws upon the tradition of studio design
critique; we have daily visits from our industry partners and other
practitioners with whom we engage in an authentic critical dialogue
about the work. In this exchange, the work is discussed within a
broader context — ideas (and prototypes) are exchanged, improvements
and alternatives suggested. We then advance to the third phase of the
innovation cycle — iterate. Iteration within the Lab means returning
to ‘Step One’ to push our ideas further. Iteration within our
partners’ organizations means taking a prototype towards real-world
application. In both cases, we can learn from our mistakes (and
successes).
/blockquote
Another secret is fire:
blockquote
Fire fuels the Media Lab. We invest in the passion of people, not
their projects. It is the fire that burns in every student and faculty
member that inspires and motivates them — love is a better master than
duty. Innovation at the Lab comes from the bottom up. It is not
regulated by a top-down process, but by continuous feedback from
peers, the faculty, and our external collaborators.
/blockquote
These principles proved affective at MIT in establishing a learning
community that is both collaborative and critical. These same
principles were an influence on the design of Sugar; however, we can
probably do more to embody them directly into Sugar itself.
Diego and I spent the next two hours exploring how we might make the
creative process more explicit in Sugar. He suggested that we consider
two common, approachable heuristics in our deliberations—SCAMPER and
PPCo.
SCAMPER is a technique developed by Alex Osborn, described in his book
Applied Imagination. SCAMPER is an acronym for substitute, combine,
adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate, reverse. It is used for
encouraging divergent thinking.
PPCo is also an acronym: positives, potentials, concerns, overcoming
concerns. It was developed by Roger Firestien and Diane
Foucar-Szocki; it is used for convergent thinking.
What follows is a brief summary of our
