When most of us think about teaching creativity, we think of brainstorming. Brainstorming is widely used in industry, but it has some limitations. Ideas may be lost because too many people are talking at once; individuals may withhold ideas out of fear of being judged; and dominant individuals may keep others with possibly better ideas from contributing.[1] An alternative to brainstorming that helps avoid these limitations is brainwriting.[2] Students are given the same type of prompt, but instead of contributing ideas orally, each person writes a list of ideas. The lists are compiled and shared with the whole group, which then brainstorms additional ideas. Check out some prompts for brainwriting activities and ideas for how to conduct them in our first blog on creative thinking skills.
Another interesting alternative to brainstorming is bisociation. This technique challenges students to use two unrelated things to stimulate new ideas. The steps in the approach are:
- Choose a stimulus
- Capture what you know about it on a whiteboard
- Make associations or connections
Suppose you want to get ideas for improvements to a tool (stethoscope, garlic press, etc.). You choose an unrelated stimulus (wireless speaker, ruler, etc.) and have students explore everything they know about it. Then you ask students to make connections between the original item and the new stimulus. The result is a much richer source of ideas because of the unexpected connections. Felder[3] used a variation of this technique in an undergraduate fluid dynamics course, when he asked students to brainstorm ways to measure the viscosity of a fluid and gave double credit for methods that involved the use of a hamburger.
To find out more about bisociation, take a look at a short 6-minute video by Ken Bloemer of the KEEN Engineering Unleashed program at the University of Dayton.
Give one of these ideas a try in a class you teach. You’re bound to get students thinking in new ways and having fun doing it!
[1] Heslin, P.A. (2009). Better than brainstorming? Potential contextual boundary conditions to brainwriting for idea generation in organizations. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 82, 129-145.
[2] Van Gundy, A.B. (1983). Brainwriting for new product ideas: An alternative to brainstorming. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 1, 67–74.
[3] Felder, R.M. (1987). On creating creative engineers. Engineering Education, 77(4), 222–227.
