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Ideation is not easy at first. How do you find new ideas that are cool and you feel passionate about? The answer is not straightforward, but you must understand that as everything in life, ideation is a muscle, that you have probably rarely used since elementary school. My goal here is to lay out how I find my ideas and how to get used to seeing the world in a more creative way.
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If your goal is to get a good idea, it is key to open up and learn what is possible beyond your knowledge. Our minds find it hard to imagine things beyond what we already know, so going on Pinterest or a similar place and looking for random keywords might be an interesting starting point if you want to do something different. But I feel like understanding that you won’t be original and that it is fine to copy and build something even if it already exists it is of the upmost importance.
Being creative is mostly just stealing from several sources and combining ideas together. Even the best ideas and apps you can think off had some kind of inspiration on something that already existed. What this means, is that you should copy and be ok copying others!
First, I want to cover the games we have done in the past during Hackathons, EDWs, which help students come up with ideas and open up to new possibilites. These may or may not directly generate ideas, but it makes students talk to each other and build something, what helps as an icebreaker for future ideation.
In this activity, we setup a zipline and students get to build a lego part that will race down the line. One of the strengths of this activity is how open minded it is, as there is very little to no instructions and it is very easy to experiment and learn lots of cool physics with it.
What do you need?
Using a bunch of sticks, eyebolts and zip ties, we build a huge tetrahedron, which is itself made of smaller tetrahedrons!
The process starts with students building triangles out of six sticks (each stick has two eyebolt, one in each side and we join them together using zip ties). The process then repeats as students join these triangles to form bigger and bigger tetrahedrons.
With soda bottles, students build very bad rockets (important that they are very bad) that will propel a balloon up to the sky. The aim here is for the rocket to fall as soon as possible and the object to carry all the momentum.
Basically you stick a bunch of terribly placed winglets to the side and the bottom of another bottle to the top of a water bottle and using a launcher you load it with water and air that will launch it!
In the previous section we covered games we usually do to help students meet each other and get out of the “Boring school” thinking process and have a bit of fun while learning something cool. Now its the moment to really think: “What the hell do I want to do?”. Here, I’ll lay out some games we have done to try and get students to get new ideas.
One person has 5 seconds to draw something in a piece of paper. Then, the paper is immediately passed to another student, who again has 5 seconds to now add something to the drawing. After everyone has done this, one of the students has to explain what project they have drawn.
Forget about what is possible or not, the laws of physics, everything. What do you think it’s cool to do as a project if it were possible.
What to do and not to do when coming up with ideas.
Your idea might be complemented or joined with someone else’s idea and create something new and cool. Do not laser focus on your one idea, listen to others and try and see if you can improve your idea with people’s ideas or find something that you would rather do.
I know we all come into hackathons with friends and people we know better. But from personal experience, when you go out and join with random people, it is surprisingly likely you will make new friends. Building a project is one of the most bounding experiences out there. You need to listen to the other person and understand what they want and need, making it very easy for you to bond and become friends.
I feel like an advice here from experience, is to not try and save humanity with your project by curing cancer. Sure, it would be awesome, but if you are trying to find something you are excited to do and want to do, probably having such overarching goals will only frustrate you and you will barely move the needle. You can for sure do a project to help save lives, but forget about stereotypical “let’s get rid of polio”, instead start with simpler goals, like “Let’s build a project to try and help people bring water from a river to their homes”. A lot of students are too focused with what school teaches them (that they should have a positive impact on the world) that they forget what they want, not society.
What is something you really care about? Are you a basketball fan? Do you love building with lego? Make your project related to that! Find ways to improve your experience, or making it different.