Podcast264: Grassroots Creativity: Helping Everyone Become a Creative Thinker by Dr. Mitchel Resnick

By Wesley Fryer On July 13, 2008 · · 1 Comment

This podcast features a recording of Dr. Mitchel Resnick’s NECC 2008 presentation “Grassroots Creativity: Helping Everyone Become a Creative Thinker.” This session was shared on July 2, 2008 in San Antonio, Texas. Dr. Resnick is a professor at MIT and works at the MIT Media Lab with some of the most innovative and creative thinkers in the world focused on learning and education. The official conference description of this session was: In today’s fast-changing society, everyone needs to think creatively. I will discuss new technologies from MIT Media Lab that help students develop as creative thinkers. When people think about creativity, they often think about people like Mozart, Picasso, Curie, and Einstein, people who transformed their fields with radically new ideas and creations. But creativity is not only for the select few. In today’s fast-changing society, everyone needs the ability to come up with creative solutions to unexpected everyday problems. Our research group at the MIT Media Lab has been developing a family of educational technologies, including Scratch (scratch.mit.edu) and Crickets (www.picocricket.com), with the explicit goal of helping students develop as creative thinkers. In this presentation, I will discuss the ideas and strategies underlying these new technologies, and I will present case studies of how students are using these technologies to create, invent, experiment, explore – and become more creative thinkers.

Show Notes:

Scratch Software
Lifelong Kindergarten
PicoCricket
MIT Media Lab
Sowing the Seeds for a More Creative Society by Mitchel Resnick (PDF)
All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) I Learned (By Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten by Mitchel Resnick (PDF)
Computer as Paintbrush: Technology, Play, and the Creative Society by Mitchel Resnick (PDF)
My text notes from this presentation (including some additional links)
Dr. Mitchel Resnick’s Keynote at BLC07: Tools for Creative Thinking (shared by Bob Sprankle)

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