Inventing Is Kid’s Stuff, Too : Imagination: Inside all children is the ability to create. The problem is, they--and their parents--may not know it.
The Tombstone of the Future is much more than a cold, carved slab. This grave marker has a digital screen in its center. Just touch it and you’ll hear and see, in living color, everything the departed person wants you to remember him by.
The technology already existed--but the idea never did until Mara Gendel, 16, of Long Beach went to sleep one night this past summer and literally dreamed up the invention, which won this year’s Great Idea contest sponsored by Popular Science magazine.
Even more significant, Mara says she didn’t know she had such a creative idea in her head, had no thought of being an inventor, and would have been perfectly content to continue her vegetative summer if her father hadn’t bugged her to do something exciting with her time and her brain.
“I still don’t know how or why I came up with this,” Mara says. “Maybe it’s because Jerry Garcia had just died.”
Some people think they know exactly how she, and millions of other youngsters, can come up with great ideas or achievements of any kind. All a grown-up has to do is ask--and the earlier you start asking, the better.
The result might be a motorcycle parachute, like the one Andrew Mulkeen, 12, of North Hollywood designed to deploy seconds before impact in an accident, removing the rider from harm. “It pulls you backward off your cycle so you don’t get hurt,” he says.
Or the power-lock safety switch dreamed up by four eighth-graders to prevent a switch from being accidentally turned on. “Say your ring falls in the garbage disposal and your elbow kicks on the switch while your hand is inside. It won’t go on if you have the power lock,” says Bart Mazur, 12, one of the four inventors who worked with a mentor from General Electric.
Even little kids--ages 3, 4 and 5--can amaze themselves and their elders with ingenuity and achievements of all sorts, experts say, if the encouragement to do so is offered with love, with no pressure to perform and, perhaps most important, in a spirit of fun.
“If you don’t know how to encourage youngsters to problem-solve and be creative, they will not go through the process on their own,” says Marion Canedo, a founder and former president of the National Inventive Thinking Assn. (NITA), which held its annual meeting in Los Angeles last week.
“If you do encourage them,” she adds, “the results are beyond belief.”
Canedo ought to know. She’s the one who, as a second-grade teacher in Buffalo, N.Y., tried to help her students develop their critical thinking and problem-solving skills by asking them to become inventors.
“I asked them to find some small but meaningful thing that needed doing--and then invent a way to do it,” she says. She got immediate results. A 5-year-old named Chad, for example, invented a floating puzzle game for the bathtub or swimming pool, consisting of Styrofoam pieces to be scattered in the water, then collected and put together to form shapes of animals, apples or a map of the United States.
The next year, Canedo involved the whole school. Chad returned with what looked like exactly the same game. “Very good,” she praised him, gingerly asking if it wasn’t what he’d done the year before.
“This one is much better,” said the proud child. “I put sinkers in some of the pieces, so you have to dive to the bottom to get them.”
Canedo, who became director of early childhood education for Buffalo public schools, expanded the project citywide, and now, thanks to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, it can go to any home or school in the nation.
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Before you tune out, because you know in your heart that your adored toddler shows no signs of being another Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell, just listen to the members of the National Inventive Thinking Assn.
Your brand of negative thinking is what’s stopping America in its tracks, these thinkers say. Every child has within him or her the ability to excel in some or many areas of life. And it’s often the kids with special needs, or the kids deemed “average,” who can turn out to be the brightest lights when allowed to access their creativity. Programs like Canedo’s aren’t about inventing at all, they say. They’re about challenging kids to use their amazing, but often hidden, capabilities.
And who stops them? Adults who themselves have often been stymied and don’t understand.
“Creative thinking is very different from verbal or analytical thinking, which is what most of us have been taught to do with math and reading in school,” says Dee Dickinson, founder of New Horizons for Learning, an international education network.
“We all have at least five different kinds of intelligence in addition to the verbal and logical, which are the two kinds of intelligence taught, tested and rewarded in our schools,” she says. But the other kinds are equally important and should be equally rewarded, she says. They are visual/spatial intelligence, kinesthetic (body) intelligence, musical intelligence, interpersonal intelligence (the ability to communicate and interact with people), and intrapersonal (the ability to understand our own thinking and emotional processes).
Often, only by involving the creative side is a child able to access the logical and analytical side, which in turn allows him to excel in academics.
Dickinson, like most NITA members, believes passionately that the arts must be integrated into educational programs from kindergarten on up.
“Children involved in music, drama, dance, drawing have sudden and unexpected leaps in their academic work. There is a tremendous connection between creative activities and academic improvement.
“Many kids are not able to learn the basic skills if they are taught abstractly--that is, through listening, reading, looking at numbers on a blackboard or in a book. Many can learn abstractions such as math through singing and dancing or hands-on construction stuff,” she says.
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When about 50 adults showed up in Dickinson’s seminar at the NITA convention last weekend, she greeted them in an undecipherable tongue, a broad smile on her face.
“Gabloosh hracka?” she asked one woman, who muttered an embarrassed response.
Soon the entire room was smiling and responding in their own made-up languages. When asked to write a paragraph, one adult came up with “Minish raskee fromphkin mashmi shultz shashlik shok.” Asked to translate, he said: “Having had a pleasant day, I am ready for the evening.”
Why such an exercise? It’s one of dozens of “brain pepper-uppers” Dickinson uses to break the mental logjam and help people understand just how creative they can be, how many wonderful things their brains can come up with.
Another, more physical demonstration: All the guests were asked to stand and juggle an imaginary ball in their left hand while bouncing a yo-yo in their right hand, while balancing an orange on the tip of their upturned nose, while jogging in place, while imagining they were skiing down a steep slope, at the bottom of which they fell full force into a high mound of soft snow.
The group was refreshed after that one, which Dickinson explained is an excellent exercise for a classroom full of bored, cooped-up kids.
“The economic tone of the country has changed dramatically,” says Scott Shickler, 29, founder of Educational Designs that Generate Excellence (EDGE), a company that teaches entrepreneurship.
“I was taught that you get a job and you work hard and keep doing better at it--and that’s how to live your life. Today’s kids, however, will need to grow into entrepreneurs. That demands a different kind of self-confidence and creative ability.”
He participates in projects such as the current one at Compton High School, where students will redecorate the outdated cafeteria and turn it into a cafe--with a more kid-friendly food, a computerized ordering system (so kids can order lunch in the morning and it will waiting for them to pick up at noon)--and an atmosphere that will make more students want to stay on campus at lunch, instead of leaving the school grounds.
Jon Pearson, NITA member and educational consultant, uses doodling, drawing and all sorts of funny stuff to show kids just how creative they are. At last week’s convention, for example, about 90 kindergartners and first-graders seemed mesmerized by his antics.
“Picture a 500-ton dinosaur,” he told them. “Now imagine he has a red hat, yellow tie, blue shirt, green pants, purple shoes, pink socks, white gloves. . . .” Pearson went on to list dozens of items in such a fast-paced patter that most grown-ups turned their ears off. Suddenly Pearson stopped and asked: What color were the pants?
“Green!” screamed the tots in unison. The adults were stunned.
“Kids have amazing powers,” Pearson says. “They all start out with an attitude of ‘Let’s do it, and see what happens.’ They don’t care if the answer is right or wrong. They raise their hands even if they have no answer. They wiggle their feet in sand, roll on the rug. Everything is a learning experience and a seeing experience that delights them.
“Then, around third or fourth grade, they switch from their discovery mode of ‘let’s do it’ to the mode of ‘Don’t do it unless we can do it right.’ They move from a world of seeing to a world of being seen. They end up looking for stuff instead of looking at stuff. That’s why the arts in education are so fabulously important. It helps kids maintain their wonder and their ability to see things, which is what makes people successful in the world.”
