Being creative means being bold and imaginative and not limiting your thinking to what’s already been done. Everyone is creative, and although most equate creativity with artistic talent, creativity is a skill you can practice and improve in a wide variety of ways. It’s a process, not a single light bulb moment.
The essential first step of creativity is believing you’re creative. That might take practice! That’s why we’ve gathered these 12 great creativity resources for youth and adults:
Brainstorming is a process you can get better at with practice! Learn about the four brainstorming rules and apply them to a fun challenge: making a pig fly. Don’t let the silly topic fool you: this activity is great for helping adults practice their creativity, too.
Scratch is a programming environment that enables young people to create their own interactive stories, games, and simulations, and then share those creations in an online community with other young programmers from around the world.
MIT’s Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten group offers the free Learning Creative Learning course to create a global community of like-minded educators and learners that foster the same environment of creative learning that it’s teaching to participants.
We often hear from teachers that they would love to incorporate entrepreneurial learning into their classes but have limited time. This creative game is a quick, easy way to introduce the entrepreneurial process and the associated mindsets and skills!
Canva is a graphic design platform, used to create presentations, posters, videos, social media graphics, documents and other visual content. The tool includes hundreds of templates to kick start creativity! It’s 100% free for K12 teachers and their students.
Janet Echelman found her true voice as an artist when her paints went missing — which forced her to look at things differently and led her to new creative solutions.
Think outside the box to find creative solutions to challenges with reverse brainstorming! This isn’t your normal brainstorming technique: instead of solving a problem, you make it worse!
What a Great Idea (WAGILabs) helps youth be their creative selves and Sail the Seven C’s in their EntrepreneurSHIP. This poster of Empower Phrases is one of many great resources that help youth validate and grow their creative thinking and problem solving skills.
One of the cardinal rules of creativity is that your first idea is rarely your best. Investing time in rethinking, reimagining, and rediscovering often produces breakthroughs that transform so-so concepts into works of genius. SCAMPER perfectly enables this process of reinvention. Though this activity features a holiday decoration, any item, process, or idea can be SCAMPERed!
Tina is the faculty director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, a center within Stanford Engineering that helps entrepreneurs turn their ideas, enthusiasm, and energy into real-world products. This lecture presents the idea “If necessity is the mother of invention, then constraints are the father.”
Developed by X (formally GoogleX), this game features global goals that will need the brightest minds and imaginations to solve, all mapped to the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The game has 100 problem cards and 100 technology cards making for a total of 10,000 different possible combinations.
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