A Recipe for Creative Juice

How kids learn to imagine and create with technology

My public elementary school provided run-of-the-mill ways to explore creativity. Tuesdays and Thursdays we hit music class to practice chorales, compose clapping rhythms and, if we were lucky, add our own moves to the prepubescent favorite “Chicken Dance.” Back in our regular classroom, teachers would sporadically introduce visual arts projects. We drew flowers for Mother’s Day and images of outer space inspired by astronomy lessons. Sometimes we would wax poetic, responding to the limited forms of poetry allotted to us with haikus about Seattle’s outlandish precipitation…

Rain is sort of blue / Rain is very annoying / I don’t like the rain

I imagine that from this short supply of artistic media, a solid plurality of kids satisfied their creative urges, and that’s awesome. It’s wonderful that our school exposed its students to the various arts, embracing the musician, the wordsmith, even the puerile finger painter, matching their affinities and talents with captivating projects.

But none of these activities unleashed my creative juices.

Although I’ve since grown to love composing music, experimenting with visual aesthetics and even writing poetry, I didn’t gravitate towards these types of pursuits until the end of elementary school. In fact, I never called myself “creative” until then. These interests and this label manifested themselves after a specific experience using technology taught me that I love creating.

As a fifth grader I was a video game fanatic. This obsession led me to Google easy ways to make my own games for the computer and find the free software GameMaker. I knew nothing about programming or making games, but the project’s simple interface piqued my curiosity. I worked through several tutorials and built a simplified version of Space Invaders.

The protagonist of my first computer game, Nuclear Cow Warriors

Then came the fun part. I was going through a cow phase at the time, so I made all of my characters mysterious bovines, chemically altered in the lab of a mad scientist. My final creation, Nuclear Cow Warriors, was made possible by re-coloring cow images from the timeless Super Nintendo hit Earthbound. Before burning the game’s .exe file onto a dozen CDs for my friends, I spent hours and hours tweaking little details to make the game more engaging and challenging. The size of my characters, their speeds, basic enemy cow artificial intelligence—everything was subject to scrutiny. When I was done, the feeling that came from watching my friends enjoy the game that I had spent so much time and energy on was priceless.

While this project definitely played a role in birthing my fascination with computer science, it also shaped my belief that, like the kids in my class that drew, danced, and wrote, I was creative. Building something that I could call my own—even if it was hacked together with the help of pre-existing images and software—invigorated me in a way that succeeding in math or science never could. It enabled me to leave my mark on the gaming world, however small, and I soon grew addicted to the feeling. It’s the same feeling that motivates me to design technology and that drives my friends and mentors to create apps, strategize campaigns, build organizations and explore an infinite array of other ventures. This feeling helps us create with more fervor each and every day we strive to bring something new into the world. It fed not only our success but also our sense of success.

Graphics created with the Logo programming language, one of many technologies for invention during childhood

MIT Media Lab emeritus professor Seymour Papert, father of constructionism and creator of the Logo programming language for children, once said, “The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.” To an extent, I agree. But I think the responsibility should be extended to education technologists. Teaching children to explore the visual, literary and performing arts only skims the surface of creative endeavors that could spark their imagination and inventive spirit.

By building technology for invention rather than simply creating the conditions for invention, we can give children opportunities to create in non-traditional ways, perhaps giving those students who—like me—had trouble connecting to an elementary arts education. With thoughtfully crafted technology for invention, kids can create games, web experiences and even unique products of the digital age that we have yet to contrive. Within our rapidly changing technological environment, creative thinking will not only make students more valuable in their future careers, it will also bring them lifelong fulfillment.

Let’s create creativity.

Dylan Portelance is an MA candidate at Tufts University’s Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development.