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6174
Keprekar's constant

Mysterious number

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9 Mindsets of Most Successful people.

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Schooling system

6 Problems with our School System The traditional system of education was designed in the industrial age and is now outdated and ineffective. Learn about the 6 major problems with the system....

The Creativity Crisis

Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the "Torrance kids," a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance. Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a fire truck and asked, "How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?" He recalls the psychologist being excited by his answers. In fact, the psychologist's session notes indicate Schwarzrock rattled off 25 improvements, such as adding a removable ladder and springs to the wheels. That wasn't the only time he impressed the scholars, who judged Schwarzrock to have "unusual visual perspective" and "an ability to synthesize diverse elements into meaningful products."

The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful, and that's what's reflected in the tests. There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).

Like intelligence tests, Torrance's test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. "It's very clear, and the decrease is very significant," Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is "most serious."

It's too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it's left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there's no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

To understand exactly what should be done requires first understanding the new story emerging from neuroscience. The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it'd be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach.

Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

Is this learnable? Well, think of it like basketball. Being tall does help to be a pro basketball player, but the rest of us can still get quite good at the sport through practice. In the same way, there are certain innate features of the brain that make some people naturally prone to divergent thinking. But convergent thinking and focused attention are necessary, too, and those require different neural gifts. Crucially, rapidly shifting between these modes is a top-down function under your mental control. University of New Mexico neuroscientist Rex Jung has concluded that those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains' creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.

Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it'd stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they've pretty much stopped asking. It's no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn't stop asking questions because they lost interest: it's the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.

t's also true that highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn't lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.

From fourth grade on, creativity no longer occurs in a vacuum; researching and studying become an integral part of coming up with useful solutions. But this transition isn't easy. As school stuffs more complex information into their heads, kids get overloaded, and creativity suffers. When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don't, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don't finish college at high rates.

They're quitting because they're discouraged and bored, not because they're dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It's a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They're not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they're engaged, motivated, and open to the world.

Game-Based Learning Is Set To Be The Next Big Thing In U.S. Classrooms

Advancements in digital technology have impacted all aspects of life over the past two decades, but the last year and a half was exceptional–technology has ingrained itself into our lives like never before. In fact, one space where technology didn’t hold much sway earlier was the education sector. Digital technology was not considered mainstream in the world’s schools, and some estimates said that digitization of classrooms stood at just 2%, at the end of 2019.

The revenues in the game-based learning market were predicted to be more than $24 billion by 2024. But due to the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the global investment in learning technology companies surged to a whopping $36.38 billion in 2020 itself, up drastically from the $18.66 billion invested in 2019 and more than double the $16.34 billion invested in 2018, according to Metaari.

COVID-19 pandemic has catapulted the importance of technology in the edtech sector and thrown up plenty of opportunities for growth in the classrooms. There are many different modes and methods in digital education like Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Video-Assisted Learning and Online Tutoring, etc. One form that has shown significant and impactful growth in recent months, with no signs of slowing down is game-based learning. Reports show that the spending will only grow in the coming years.

The biggest, unseen and unexpected catapult to online learning of any sort has been COVID-19. Along with this, there are other trends, like the rapid emergence of social media, disposable incomes, increasing pe*******on of smartphones, rising access to high-speed internet, etc. that have also contributed and will continue to fuel the rise of game-based learning in the years to come.

Heavy Investments Into The Edtech Sector
Edtech Venture Capitalists have grown a whopping 32x since 2010. In 2020 itself, over 1,500 deals have been recorded and almost a third have been in the K12 segment. This is also because of the rising demand for quality education with a modern and interactive approach suited to the needs of the time.

The Rising Popularity Of Mobile Devices
Even if they don’t own one themselves, many children today have access to mobile devices, whether it’s a household tablet or their parent’s smartphone. In the U.S., for example, 81% of U.S. adults own a smartphone, which is even higher than those who have access to broadband internet at home. The numbers are not as high in lower-income households, but they’re still significant. According to Pew Research Center, smartphone ownership is at 78% for those with annual incomes between $30,000 and $49,999, and 71% for those who make less than $30,000 each year. And as many parents will tell you, today’s kids love to play games on mobile devices, making game-based learning a key opportunity for both parents and educators.

A Greater Focus On Personalized Learning
An increasing number of educators are using adaptive software that can adjust to a student’s skill level, giving them a more personalized and effective educational experience. The general idea is that taking each student’s unique skill set, experiences, preferences, background, and abilities into account gives them a customized experience that can positively impact learning outcomes. While some have indicated concerns over too much screen time for kids, parents and educators have the ability to make student screen time more valuable through game-based learning.

Parents And Educators Increasingly Realize That Game-Based Learning Works
Even though game-based learning dates back to the 1970s and ’80s with the likes of The Oregon Trail, video gaming in those days developed a reputation among many adults that it was a mindless and mundane activity with little or no educational value. Attitudes have changed, however, and gaming now stands as a legitimate form of entertainment that has its own benefits. Even more importantly for parents and educators, there is a whole new generation of educational-based games on the market that are both fun and engaging to kids, as well as effective at helping them learn across multiple subjects. It addresses a key need of the hour because it teaches students in a way that equips them with future-ready skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving.

While these trends will each play a significant role in the inevitable growth and wider adoption of game-based learning, challenges still remain. For example, teachers might need game-based professional training to obtain a full grasp of the concepts and make the most effective use of game-based educational tools. But as recent circumstances have shown, teachers rose to the challenge and went digital almost overnight, then this too can be tackled with the right mindset. The next step will be to include technology and game-based learning as an integral part of curriculums, as opposed to a supplemental component. Only then will students maximize the benefits that game-based learning has to offer.