Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Creativity


Creativity is an essential component of innovation and growth.  Being creative allows people to think out side of the box and come up with new ideas.  Without creativity many of the things we use in our day-to-day lives would not have been invented.

Working as a camp counselor there have been a number of times that I have had to be creative.  A particular time that I had to be creative was over this past summer, when it started raining at camp and all the actives that my co-consolers and I had planned had to be canceled.  We originally planned to play outside with the kids all day but the sudden downpour of rain didn’t allow us to do that.  Instead we were forced to spend a few hours in a gym.  We had to come up with a game for 80 3rd-6th graders to play.  In the gym my co-counselors and I noticed that there were a number of basketball, empty trashcans, dodge balls and mats.  We began to brainstorm all of the things we could do with those materials.  We ended up coming up with a game called gladiators.  We stood the mats ups and told the kids that they had to hide behind the mats and shoot the basketballs into the trashcans without getting hit by a dodge ball.  The game ended up being a huge success and ever since then the kids have asked to play the gladiators game.

I do not think my prospective on creativity changed because of the workshop.  But I do think the workshop showed me that it is not as hard as I thought it was to be creative.  If I just take more time to actually think about what I am trying to do, instead of jumping right into things I think I could be more creative.  I really enjoyed the play activates that we did during the workshop.  They really were a lot of fun.