This TEDx Talks (2016) deals with creativity in children, and mostly why, and when, children are more creative than adults. Alison Gopnik, the speaker, is a developmental psychologist and professor of psychology, at the University of California, Berkeley. She mostly works on cognitive sciences, and she has particularly focused her work towards babies’ development and learning abilities. Alison Gopnik starts this intervention by saying that babies are like scientists: they make hypotheses, they experiment and they make theories about the world around them in order to better understand it. This talk focuses on two experiments that Alison Gopnik conducted with four years old children and undergraduate students of Berkeley.
The first experiment:
This first experiment is called the “Blicket detector”. It is a box where you can put some blocks on top, from different shapes (square, round, triangle). Some blocks are going to light up the box which is going to start playing music. Those are called “blicket”. Other blocks do not activate the box. The experimenter put the blocks on the box, alone or combined. The goal of this experiment is to ask children if the different shapes are blicket or no, in other words, if a certain block, for example the square one, is going to light up the box. This first experiment shows that children use a creative and unusual solution in order to solve the task. On the contrary, adults never use this creative solution, but rather use the obvious answer. For example, if putting a square and a triangle does not light up the box, putting a triangle and a round do light up the box and putting the three shapes light up the box, adults are going to answer that square and triangle blocks are not blickets, and round block is one. But, children are going to answer that triangle and round are blickets: this is the creative solution. This result is also found in the second study introduced in the video.
The second experiment:
This second study focuses more on the way teaching at school fits in this way of solving, using creative solutions. In this experiment, the machine used is a toy with different actions that can be done in order to make the toy play music, or not. The experimenter can squeeze the bulb, pull the ring, pull the handle. Depending on the series of actions, it can allow the music to play. In the first part of this study, experimenters start by saying that they have a new toy, but they don’t know how it works and ask children to help them. The experimenter starts to make a lot of series of different actions. What is observed is, even if the number of events is significant, children can tell which actions do make the toy play music (“squeeze the bulb” and “pull the ring” are the two actions): they use a creative solution in order to know what are the right actions to play music. In the second part of the study, the same experiment is made but experimenters start by saying that this is their toy and they are going to show children how it works. So, in this case, they placed themselves as teachers. What is shown in this part is that children never use the creative solution. Instead, they imitate the experimenter. This second experiment is an illustration of what happens in school: teachers demonstrate how to solve different problems and children do the same. It allows children to solve problems faster, but they lose the exploration and creative solution they can find in order to solve a problem.
Why children are creative?
The last part of this video explains why children are so creative. This is mostly due to a biological fact: childhood is an extremely long period of time which aims children to learn, explore, innovate and be creative. It is even more important nowadays, to have this period of time to let children explore, innovate and experiment because the world is more unpredictable and is constantly changing. It give them the opportunity to better adjust. But, the system of teaching at school is implanted more and more sooner and research shows that this is not appropriate to how children should grow up. Alison Gopnik adds that given children more space and time, in order to explore the world around them, to innovate and to play is going to be useful for them to deal with all the changes in their adult life.
We can quote Alison Gopnik to conclude this post: “We have to stop thinking that what we need to do is make children learn and realise that all we have to do is let children learn”.
You can find this TED Talks in the following link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggofc-kDk6w