Vision of Innovation

Photo by Alex // Berlin (away for 3days)
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Encouraging students to use their youthful strength, the plasticity of their brain function to create or innovate is the passion of Toshiba in partnership with the National Science Teachers Association. To fulfill their passion, they created the ExploraVision Award.

When NSTA and Toshiba think of creativity and innovation, they refer to innovation in future technology, and that includes all areas of life. From previous discussions, you may think about Who is a Science Teacher? Students can pursue creative thinking through purposeful, structured means, such as lateral thinking, or they may have a unique idea, a brainstorm, that could change how some common object is used. Their creative thinking may be more unstructured and it could create a totally new process or product. Either way, students can be encouraged to explain and share their ideas for an opportunity to earn scholarships for themselves and technology for their school.

Encourage teachers to help students participate in Toshiba/NSTA's ExploraVision opportunity. Whether they win an ExploraVision award or not, they will learn to collaborate, explain and enjoy the process of creative thinking. Can you help?

Create and Innovate

Photo by denis collette
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What does it mean to create and innovate? While there may be nuanced differences among authorities, the main meanings refer to tandem processes of invention or creation and introduction or innovation of new ideas, processes or things.

In referencing the Cambridge Dictionaries Advanced Learning dictionary, one can define these terms in this way: 1. create: "to make something new, especially to invent something", and 2. innovate: to introduce changes and new ideas.

The Business Dictionary describes the process of creation or innovation within the context of creative thinking as:

looking at problems or situations from a fresh perspective that suggests unorthodox solutions (which may look unsettling at first).

The authors describe thinking processes by which people create or innovate, including unstructured thinking processes such as brainstorming and structured thinking that would include lateral thinking.

These business definitions are closely aligned with those educators think of when using or describing the higher order thinking skills of critical or creative thinking processes. The most famous of these would be Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.