This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

SCAMPER Towards Original Thinking with Your Kids

SCAMPER is an exercise that provides you an opportunity to teach your children to think out of the box!

It’s been a few months since my book, co-authored with Dr. Susan Daniels, called Raising Creative Kids was published and over a month since I wrote about the importance of teaching your kids to embrace a creative life here on Patch.

Susan and I felt that Raising Creative Kids needed to be written. We counsel, consult, and teach parents, teachers, children, and adolescents who are creative and have creative potential. Often their creativity is seen as a nuisance and is not only not encouraged, but also thwarted. We are in an interesting time where there is a calling for innovative and creative minds to lead us in the 21st century; these minds are often trapped in an educational system that is focused on testing, meeting minimum grade requirements, and sticking to prescribed curriculum. Raising Creative Kids is about understanding, recognizing, and facilitating the creative processes and abilities in all young people (and adults) in order for them to maximize their development, positively impact the world, and get the most out of life.

I have received such positive feedback from parents and readers about the book that I thought I would share an exercise here from the book every so often for my Patch parent readership.

Find out what's happening in Napa Valleywith free, real-time updates from Patch.

This exercise is called SCAMPER. It is an idea-generating technique. Similar to elaboration, it is based on the notion of mentally making changes to objects in your surroundings to create something new, or at least a novel variation of something that already exists.

SCAMPER stands for:

Find out what's happening in Napa Valleywith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Substitute

Combine

Adapt

Minify, magnify, modify

Put to other uses

Eliminate

Reverse or rearrange

So to SCAMPER or generate ideas about an Oreo cookie, for example, you might substitute mint filling, combine it with ice cream, adapt it by making smaller snack packages rather than an entire box, magnify or minify it by making each cookie larger or smaller or even putting in double the filling, put it to other uses by creating an Oreo-shaped keychain, eliminate by changing the recipe to create low-fat Oreos; and reverse or rearrange it by making three layers of cookie and two of frosting. Now, as anyone who loves Oreos knows, most of these variations already have been created over the past decade or so. But once upon a time, there was just the plain, original Oreo in the cookie aisle of the grocery store. Someone at the Nabisco Company had to come up with the ideas for these new kinds of Oreos, and one can imagine that the SCAMPER method might have been pretty useful in that context.

What other items might you SCAMPER to make new or interesting variations? A bicycle? A highlighting pen? A mug? A rowboat? A computer mouse?

I hope you enjoy doing this fun exercise for your kids. I will include some more from the book in future blogs as well. Don’t be surprised if these exercises not only inspire your child to think out of the box but also perhaps help you do the same.

Dr. Dan Peters, Ph.D., is co-founder of the Summit Center, which provides psychological and educational assessments and counseling for children and adolescents, specializing in the gifted, creative, and twice-exceptional.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?