Blog

Implementing in the creative problem solving process is essentially the PLAN needed to carryout the solution, it is not actually creating the solution.

In order to create a proper implementation plan, I am going to use AI but I am also going to go back to previous outputs because there were a lot of gems that I will go through and put it together in an action plan.

Access my data & output notes here.

Results

I did ask AI to make me an action plan of steps and I did get the following result:

I am taking AI’s advice and breaking this down further.

Please click here to see the completed Action Plan.

Best Practices

Make sure to use one thread when using ChatGPT3 for the entire CPS process. Implementation takes the longest to prepare because you might want to go through all of the generated outputs and put them in your action plan so that it makes sense for you and your team!

In the Creative Problem Solving process, developing is the stage where you move from ideas to solutions by evaluating and strengthening the ideas. CPS is not a linear process so moving through each stage happens as often as you need it to.

I ended the ideation process with the following statement:

What I now see myself doing is creating a series of interactive modules that will introduce students to the concept of openness to new ideas and experiences, and provide them with strategies for cultivating this important personality trait. These modules will include a range of multimedia resources, such as videos, podcasts, and online articles, as well as experiential learning activities, student-led discussions, and other interactive elements.

I will also include opportunities for students to explore topics independently and to share their ideas and perspectives with one another. By the end of the course, I envision that students will have the tools and strategies they need to cultivate openness to new ideas and experiences and embrace change in their personal and professional lives.

I asked AI to generate possible concerns they can forecast which resulting in about 10 ideas total. I then narrowed the three that I felt were more important for me to think about and generate solutions for. I used the PPCO tool to do this.

Access my data & output notes here.

Results

NOW, what I see myself doing is creating a series of interactive modules that will introduce students to the concept of openness to new ideas and experiences, and provide them with strategies for cultivating this important personality trait. To create engaging and interactive content, I will use a variety of multimedia resources such as videos, podcasts, and online articles, as well as experiential learning activities, student-led discussions, and other interactive elements. I will also encourage student participation and incorporate real-world examples and case studies to promote active learning. To market the course, I will use social media, utilize email marketing, attend conferences or events, collaborate with other educators or experts, offer free resources or webinars, and leverage partnerships or sponsorships to reach potential students and increase awareness of the course. To meet the needs of diverse learners, I will use a variety of teaching strategies, make the course accessible, provide support, encourage student participation, use inclusive language, and be open to feedback. By the end of the course, I envision that students will have the tools and strategies they need to cultivate openness to new ideas and experiences and embrace change in their personal and professional lives.

Best Practices

Make sure that you continue working on one large thread going back to that thread and taking notes along the way. I made the mistake of starting new threads for each stage of CPS – this was a mistake! Keep everything on the same thread.

When we ideate we use generate ideas to answer the challenge statement. We can use various strategies to when working with people to help stretch their thinking such as using tools like forced connections, etc. When working with AI for this project, I did not use any tools or strategies to stretch the AI’s thinking because I wanted to see what it can do with basic prompts.

Working with AI is different than working with others. When working with AI, I can use my own train of thought which is useful for brainstorming alone. I will not be using AI for group brainstorming but I wonder how it would work if multiple people were working on the same challenge? This could be an interesting experiment.

When working through this challenge, I wanted AI to give me possible ideas on how to layout my course. I wanted it to use Torrance Incubation Model. Before, I asked it to do anything with the TIM model I wanted to make sure AI knew about it. I asked it and it generated an answer but it was wrong. So if you are using context from a specialized field, make sure to check its understanding of it before asking specific questions.

Access my data & output notes here.

Results

I used the prompt that was generated during the completion of the clarify stage which was:

How might  I design lessons, self-guided activities, and online communities to help students develop creative traits, habits, and skills, such as openness to new ideas and experiences, through the use of psychology, technology, art, music, and other creative media, and encourage them to embrace change, build confidence and self-esteem, be open to feedback and learning from failures, and take risks and step outside their comfort zone?

From this prompt, I generated various components to this course:

• Various Titles
• Student learning objectives and goals
• Course descriptions
• Outline for the module

The output always became better as I took a previous output and asked AI to expand and elaborate. The information, I generated allowed by to complete the first ideation phase with the following challenge statement:

What I now see myself doing is creating a series of interactive modules that will introduce students to the concept of openness to new ideas and experiences, and provide them with strategies for cultivating this important personality trait. These modules will include a range of multimedia resources, such as videos, podcasts, and online articles, as well as experiential learning activities, student-led discussions, and other interactive elements.

I will also include opportunities for students to explore topics independently and to share their ideas and perspectives with one another. By the end of the course, I envision that students will have the tools and strategies they need to cultivate openness to new ideas and experiences and embrace change in their personal and professional lives.

Best Practices

AI will give you an answer based on the question you generated in the clarify stage. It is important to use the information and help AI drill down on the context of your issue. The more you expand and correct their thinking the better results you will get. In order to do this, ask AI specifically about the context you are using and make sure that they define it correctly before moving on.

When we formulate challenges we need to be thorough with our thinking that we will share with AI. The better our prework, the better AI will be able to help us formulate challenges.

We need to formulate questions in the form of:

• How to (H2)
• How might I (HMI)
• What might be all the ways (WMBATW)

We will diverge on the following:

• Rephrasing our original challenge statement from exploring the vision
• Rephrase our key data points
• Rephrasing our barriers to success
• Also considering other perspectives

Formulating challenges is easier if you spent the time to write out your answers to explain what you already have clarified about your project. The more that you are clear, the better that you can “train” your AI to provide output that makes sense.

When using AI to help you diverge on your vision, key data points, barriers and other perspectives, make sure that you can give enough context around those specifics. Write contextual prompts.

For example:

“As a teacher I wish students knew about creative attributes. I wish they were top of mind and they could engage in activities in their own time, at their own pace and in their own space. For some people, the attributes come easy but for others it is stretching out of their comfort zone. If a student is brought up in a home that didn’t expose the student to things that are “different” – a person might equate different with danger or weird, even if that is not the case. For example, I have met way too many kids that are only comfortable eating chicken nuggets and spaghetti.”

Resulted in better generation of challenge questions than:

“make questions for openness to experience and openness to ideas”

You can download the data, my inputs and outputs here.

Results / Products Created

By using various prompts and “training” the AI on my contexts, I was able to get AI to provide me with 110 reasonably different formulated challenges.

I then took these 110, and grouped them into the following categories:

110 Ideas were presented to me. I grouped them into the following categories. The number in parenthesis respresents the number of ideas in that category. You can download the list here for more detail.

• Tools/Resource/Challenges (5)
• Program/Workshop (11)
• Currlculum (4)
• Lessons (3)
• Experiential Leaning / Gamification / Interactive (7)
• Storytelling (14)
• Online Platform (2)
• Case studies/ Examples (1)
• Feedback (1)
• Accessibility (1)
• Environment (5)
• Psychology / Mindset (8)
• Meaning/Purpose (1)
• Marketing (1)
• Community Partnerships (7)
• Technology (10)
• Research (1)
• Innovative Solutions / CPS / Design Thinking (1)
• Mentorship / Coaching (12)
• Art/Music (7)
• Social Media (5)

I then ran each group through AI with the prompt:

synthesize the following questions, write in bulleted format, with each question 100 characters or less:

This prompt sped up my HITS & HIGHLIGHTING tool, by synthesizing the questions. Then I used “100 character or less” because I wanted the questions to fit on a sticky note in MURAL.

When I redo this experiment, I will also add the prompt to tell AI to substitute “HOW TO” with “H2” etc. Because I do not want the question to be a massive part of the character count.

I then used the VOTING tool in MURAL and chose the best challenge statement that really needs to be addressed and a solution needs to be found for.

I copied the 39 challenge statements I felt I needed to solve for and pasted them into AI and prompted AI to synthesize the question, which resulted in:

How might I design lessons, self-guided activities, and online communities to help students develop creative traits, habits, and skills, such as openness to new ideas and experiences, through the use of psychology, technology, art, music, and other creative media, and encourage them to embrace change, build confidence and self-esteem, be open to feedback and learning from failures, and take risks and step outside their comfort zone?

I then asked for AI to generate topics, issues, concepts that I would have to brainstorm to find a solution. I have made a document that I will follow for the ideation process, click here to view.

Best Practices

Spend time writing down your answers in clear and concise writing to clarify your ideas in the first stages of the creative problem solving process, which is Visioning and Gathering Data. The better you can write context for AI the better quality outputs you will get for formulating challenges.

The first prompt should be:

Learn [copy paste all the information from Visioning/Gather Data]

The second prompt should be:

You are a creativity expert, drawing on the research of Alex Osborn, Sidney Parnes, Ruth Noller, Edward De Bono, as well as modern creativity researchers.

We are in the stage of formulating challenges where we will generate questions in the form of “how to” “how might I”and “In what ways might I” to look at the challenge from many different ways. I will write “context” and provide information and then you will use the question forms “how to” or “how might I” or “In what ways might I” to generate various questions. When you generate the questions replace “How to” with “H2”. When you generate “How might I” replace with “HMI”. When you generate questions with “In what ways might I” replace with “IWWMI”. Also make sure that the questions you generate are 100 characters or less. Do you understand?

I spent time answering questions to gather data about the product that I want to create with AI. I want to make “something” that helps students and others interested in developing themselves as creative people to be more open to experience, which is a strong predictor of creative achievement. AI did not have anything to do with the following answers. I will now plug these in to ChatGP3 and see if it has any ideas for me.

What is the history of the situation?
As a teacher I wish students knew about creative attributes. I wish they were top of mind and they could engage in activities in their own time, at their own pace and in their own space. For some people, the attributes come easy but for others it is stretching out of their comfort zone. If a student is brought up in a home that didn’t expose the student to things that are “different” – a person might equate different with danger or weird, even if that is not the case. For example, I have met way too many kids that are only comfortable eating chicken nuggets and spaghetti.

How does this make you feel?
It makes me sad to watch people let opportunities pass because they are afraid of looking silly, failing, or just afraid of change.

Who else is involved?
Like everything the person’s environment will affect them.

Why is this a challenge?
People need to know that there is scientific data about what makes a creative person. A lot of studies have been done. One of these that are most important is Openness to Experience. 

What is your influence?
I have the knowledge, instructional design experience, and tech skills to make it a reality.

What have you already tried?
I had a unit on the creative person, I have had students do “creative person” missions and keep a journal but I need to do something more accessible for people not taking my class as well as people taking my class.

What is stopping you?
Nothing, I am ready to jump in.

What does your gut tell you?
Get started and iterate with feedback.

What is your ideal outcome?
Self directed experiential learning activities that meet the needs of learners.

What are the success criteria?
I will know that this product is a success if I get feedback that it helped a person grow their capacity for openness to experience. 

Results / Products Created

I told AI “I answered questions to clarify my thinking, can I share them with you?” Then I copied and pasted my above answers, this is what their response is. So I think that AI thinks that this is a feasible project. 

Best Practices

AI is a language pattern detector so the more specific you can be with what you are looking for, for example; ideas, feedback, etc. Provide context and feedback. Take the time to answer questions during the creative problem solving process on to a document, then copy/paste into AI – ask AI to elaborate, give you ideas, or give you feedback. The more specific, concise, and context you provide will give you a better output.

The first step in the creative problem solving process is clarifying the problem. It is about defining the exact problem to solve. To begin, I have identified a general area for the first creative product, which is helping people to improve creative person attributes. I am just finishing up a semester of teaching Creative Problem Solving to high school seniors through a program offered by Genesee Community College. As I was reflecting on my teaching practice, I decided that I want to get students practicing creative attributes before even stepping into a collaborative CPS classroom.

I wish students had a background and practice in what makes a creative person “creative” before having to learn about the creative problem solving process.

visioning a future state

Schools today do not do a good job with the top tiers of bloom’s taxonomy. A lot of students want the “right” answer. They don’t want to be wrong or look silly. I knew I had a lot of damage to undo. Creativity and creative problem solving requires a person to stretch beyond what they are normally asked to do. I realized that if I could have students learn about creative attributes before stepping into my classroom, they will be better prepared to dive in to and get the most out of the creative process.

It’s important to not self-edit and to embrace wild and unusual combinations when working on improving divergent thinking skills. Some activities might seem outlandish to someone who isn’t used to thinking outside the box.

To help my students be more open to the creative process and problem solving, which involves acceptance, openness, and playfulness, I want to help them to first adopt the attributes of creative individuals. This helps people become more comfortable with the divergent phases of these activities and be more receptive to trying new things.

The thing is, working on becoming a more creative person requires practicing it all the time, not just while in class. That is why for the first challenge, I want to work on something that I can send to students to do before stepping into class. A self-directed challenge that helps them to be more open.

Therefore the first challenge I want to tackle is to create “something” that will help people to be more open to experience and novelty which is one of the ultimate predictors of creative achievement (S. B. Kaufman & Gregoire, 2016).

So my first order of business is making sure I am solving the correct problem. I will use ChatGP3 to help me clarify my thinking and explore the vision. Let’s see what I came up with:

Results / Created Products

The results to my chat with CHATGP3 along with my insights and data can be found at this link.

First, I spent time crafting a prompt that had as much information that was clear to me in the direction that I wanted to go. Then I would use the outputs to craft more prompts, digging deeper with each step. I was given many ways to test if my idea was a viable idea as well as questions for me to ask myself to see if it was feasible. One such idea that AI could have helped me implement quickly was using the design thinking tool, empathy, to survey and interview my potential market.

I thought it was incredible how I was given such great advice on how to create a survey and interview to test out my idea. The best part it created the survey. It created the interview questions. It created the blog posts and social media! It even created the video script to introduce the survey.

Although, I will not be using the survey, ChatGP3 did a wonderful job and I think it would have been a great way to test product idea viability if needed.

Another way that AI could have helped with implementing the empathy portion of the project is by creating a CHATBOT that could potentially interview the target audience. The chatbot could be deployed on devices like ALEXA or just a text chat box. There is a lot of potential on how AI can assist a person in the clarifying stage of the creative problem solving process.

Best Practice Tip

The most useful part of my conversation with ChatGPT3 was getting it to understand what I was doing by first explaining what my project was about. Then through many interactions, usually using the output of the AI prompts to dig deeper, the quality of the output gets better. So best practice tip is actually to have a conversation with it for a few lines for the AI to learn more about your project. Then start prompting it with specifics to get quality answers.

REFERNCES

Kaufman, S. B., & Gregoire, C. (2016). Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind (Reprint). TarcherPerigee.