Educating Creativity
The annual Technology, Education, Design (TED) conference in Monterey, California produces some fascinating speakers every year, on subjects as diverse as Neurology, Architecture, Computing, Astronomy and, of course, Education.
One 2006 speaker - Sir Ken Robinson - gave a well-received talk on creativity in education (’Do Schools Kill Creativity?’) that has been doing the rounds on the education blogosphere since. Robinson discussed how we have to foster creativity in the next generation to equip children with the skills to face a rapidly-changing world.
Watch the video for yourself at the Whizz YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/whizzeducation or read on for our take on Ken Robinson’s talk.
There’s a lot to agree with in Ken’s talk. He makes an impassioned case for creativity as a key mental function; this is something we’ve always recognised and tried to incorporate into our teaching method.
The sheer variety of Maths-Whizz exercises, characters, settings and answer methods means students are encouraged to think differently about the maths they learn.
One key thing that stood out in Ken Robinson’s talk was the recognition that creativity involves being prepared to try something new - to fail - and try something else. Maths-Whizz teaching and help methods encourage this. Because confidence and attitude is vital to early maths learning, parents and teachers have to be wary of students unlearning creativity, forgetting how to ‘have a go’.
Some of the best teaching in Maths-Whizz comes when students fail - we have often tried to design exercises that help students find the answers, rather than leading them to the answers. We hope this goes some way to helping students hold on to their creativity and confidence in a subject too rarely associated with creative thinking. But if anyone ever needed confirmation that maths is creative, they can look to the mind-bending beauty of fractals or the process of discovering elegant new proofs in algebra.