I’m feeling somewhat hypocritical. Or at least hyper-critical. Something.
Last week I made a stirring case for the importance of helping kids to be creative and then my very next post (the Mix & Match pop can cozy) involved practically no creativity whatsoever. At least not on the part of the kids.
Y’see, most people assume anything to do with arts and crafts is automatically creative, and that’s not necessarily so. I knew a lot of unimaginative kids back in art school who only wanted to draw the same anime characters over and over again. I also had a biochemistry major for a roommate whose imagination ran rings around them all, but I digress.
Mixing and matching monster heads (or princesses) is not being creative.
By which I mean, there are only nine possible combinations of monster (or princess) heads, feet, and torsos. It’s a closed system with no way to create more options. So playing with just about any type of mix and match is not a creative act.
For another example, let’s look at tic-tac-toe. I think most people would agree that after ten games, you’ve pretty much got all the possible solutions to the game figured out. My calculator tells me there are 362,880 possible combinations (at least if you keep playing until all nine squares are full), only a small fraction of which lead to winning strategies. Once you reach that point of understanding, you can’t creatively play tic-tac-toe because it’s just not possible to come up with new strategies (without breaking or changing the rules anyway). Essentially, tic-tac-toe is a matching game with specific rules explaining how to mix the Xs and Os. It’s not a bad game, but it’s not creative.
No, what mixing and matching does do is give a kid a rare opportunity to make decisions. They get to choose what matches to what… and there are no wrong answers. In my experience, the least creative people are also the ones that are the most worried about doing things incorrectly. So, by letting kids make their own decisions in a no-harm no-foul context like a mix & match activity (and not, say, a tiger pit) you boost their confidence.
And feeling confident and secure in your decision-making ability… those are precursors to creativity.
Popularity: 10% [?]
