Formulating Challenges

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?