Last week we started talking about the Wilostar3D Creativity Theory and approach to learning. Today I would like to answer the common question, “What is creative learning?”
I believe that education needs to back away from teaching to standardized testing and re-emerge as the world leader in teaching our students to create, to imagine and to invent. Our nation was founded on these traits and our nation’s schools and teachers need to once again build teaching opportunities into the curriculum that foster creativity and imaginative thinking.
Addressing higher order thinking skills can be a daunting task but one thing teachers have to understand is that they can relinquish control and give some of it back to students to see remarkable results. Let students visualize how they want their virtual world to be and they can translate that into tangible, real world results. Let students unleash their imaginations and create new characters to overcome challenges in rich immersive stories and they can understand how to overcome real world obstacles.
At the basis of the WiloStar3D Creativity Theory is the following definition of creativity: to bring something into being or form out of nothing. A creative idea may be considered as a “novel combination of old ideas.” Creativity is part of how fundamentally new ideas emerge.
By creative learning, I mean that all student activities involve active cognitive processes such as creating, problem-solving, reasoning, decision-making, and evaluation. In addition, students are intrinsically motivated to learn due to the meaningful nature of the immersive learning environment and activities.
ICAN! is based upon the idea of creating successful collaborative teams and individual virtual world projects that are meaningful to someone inside AND outside the 3D classroom.
Next week we will discuss the individual components of the WiloStar3D Creativity Theory.
