Galway Creativity

In our 3rd week of classes to prepare us for our iMovies, we were assigned to create a movie about creativity.  We were assigned a partner and the assignment was: in 3 hours were were too:

PART 1: GO OUT IN GALWAY AND…

• Interview as many people as you can who have creative hobbies or “creative professions”. Ask them the following questions:
  • What makes you tick? What inspires you?
  • Explain your thinking process. How did you think of that specific idea?
  • What’s your process when you come across a problem/obstacle?
  • What made you who you are?
  • How would you define creativity?
  • Where are you most creative?

PART 2: CREATE A VIDEO STORY ABOUT CREATIVITY IN GALWAY THAT…

• Is visually striking
• Uses images and/or video
• Includes text
• Includes background music
• Includes credits
• Is a max of 2 mins

My Partner and I interviewed 5 different people and had only 45 minutes to edit and decide what to put in our video.  All 5 people were animated and happy to share about what they think creativity is and why Galway is such a creative hub, it was real hard to narrow it down to 2 minutes during the 3 hours we had to work.

Here is our final outcome:

Design Thinking Problem of Practice

In our Problem of Practice project we had to:

Identify an issue or problem area to work on
Your group will decide upon what your problem of practice is. Post your problem of practice as a comment on this page.

Empathize
Empathizing brings us closer to understanding the needs of our audience, our students, our users, or of other stakeholders in the process. It’s important to look outside of our own perspective to understand why an issue exists, so that we can begin to define the parameters, and consider solutions.

Define
You have to really know what the problem is in order to consider some good possible solutions and approaches. Defining the problem in detail, and specifying any parameters is important. You may think that you know what the problem is when you first identify it, but after gathering more information and considering other perspective, the goal is to define it in more accurate detail.

Ideate
Ideation lets us consider a fuller range of possibilities than we might otherwise. The goal will be to “go wide” in coming up with a full and rich solution set — even entertaining strange or impossible ideas to help open up our thinking. You’ll go through some brainstorming practices toward this end, with respect to your project. D

Prototype
 Experimentation brings your ideas to life. This is where you’ll begin building a prototype to make your ideas tangible, and share them with other people. 

Test
By now you should have a complete prototype draft ready. Testing is the stage that helps propel the development of your prototype or concept and improve it over time. You take the prototype (conceptual or physical) that you created previously and really test it out on some users.

Our group decided on how to get students more engaged in mathematics.  As we gathered our information we realized that the engagement part in mathematics really came down to their beliefs about math.  We decided then to try to make a presentation that would promote a mathematics mindset.  We tried to convey that making mistakes was ok and to encourage students to not give up on their math problems.  We wanted to show that there brain needs to be challenged and needs to be “exercised” in order for students to get better in math.

Here is our slideshow:

iVideo

In our last project we had to create an iVideo movie.  Our instructions were:

“The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.”
Julia Cameron

You will work in groups or as individuals to develop an i-Video – an elegant, concise, powerful video that inspires the viewer to consider an important educational idea in less that 2:30.

I decided to make my video about mental health.  There are a few filming angles and videos that I would redo but I am overall happy with the outcome.

Infographic

In Year 3 our second project was to create an Infographic from scratch.  Here were the directions:
In this project, you will create an infographic to highlight statistical, timeline, process, or geographical-based information. Your goal should be to show your audience “what they should look for among the clutter of detail” (Root-Bernstein, 1999, p. 89).
I decided to choose Mindfulness in the classroom.  We teach students and prepare them for college and the work force, but we don’t prepare them for “real life” sometimes.  Students take many AP classes and extra curricular activities so the can get into good schools like UC Berkeley or UC Davis and they get anxious and stressed out about maintain their 4.0 or 4.0+’s and forget to give themselves time to relax and just do nothing.  On the other hand some students hate school and come with bad attitudes about school and I believe they also can benefit from mindfulness in which they can step back and think before they do something they may regret.

I looked up some curriculums on mindfulness as well as some apps and websites about mindfulness and meditation.  I didn’t want the infographic to be too busy, I mean the point of mindfulness is simplicity.  I tried to make it as informational and still simple as I could.  I’m real happy with the results.

Mindfulness

 

iCinemagraph

Our first project in year 3 was to create a cinemagraph using Adobe Photoshop.  I remember how impressed I was seeing these my first year.  I was excited that I would be able to learn how to create one of these.

I found that they are easier to make that what I thought.  I got the hang of it pretty quickly.  It’s just a matter of making sure your moving object is the only thing moving in that area.  From that it’s all masking and going through the same steps.

I made a bunch, a difficulty I found was as stated before, the object you want moving has to be the only think moving in that “window”.  In my soccer cinemagraph I had to edit the video so that the persons show wasn’t moving and only the soccer ball would be moving.

Here are a few more I made of some skateboarders.  I really wanted to have a skateboarder in mid air and have the board moving under him but I wasn’t able to figure out how to do that.