Girls get creative
LOREN BENOIT/Press Zoe Gephart, left, and Camryn Carr, center, draw a concept design for an invention during a creativity workshop for girls Tuesday night at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. The presenter, Darold Cummings, right, held the workshop. This group selected “musical instrument” and “food preparation” together for their creative concept.
COEUR d’ALENE — There are no right answers in this class, and no wrong ones, either.
About 25 teen girls and their parents gathered at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Coeur d’Alene on Tuesday night to participate in a creativity workshop led by aerospace engineer and inventor Darold Cummings.
Cummings developed the workshop after he retired from Boeing as a way to help engineers learn to solve problems in new and innovative ways. He has taught the workshop at the U.S. Air Force Academy and a number of universities, from Purdue to Boise State.
This all-girl version of the workshop is meant to encourage girls to get involved in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields.
“Teenagers get caught up in not wanting to be different,” said Cathy Gephart, a parent who helped organize the workshop. “This teaches them to think outside the box.”
The participants worked in small groups, bouncing ideas off one another. Their first task was to use six toothpicks to make four equilateral triangles, without bending or breaking the toothpicks. There were no other rules.
The task proved to be challenging, but at last, one group found the solution: Rather than arranging the toothpicks flat on the table, they created a pyramid.
Cummings pointed out that most of the groups initially limited themselves to working in two dimensions, which kept them from solving the puzzle.
“The only thing that stopped you was the rule you made up yourself,” Cummings said.
He said the goal of the workshop is to allow participants to come up with ideas, uninhibited by rules or constraints, without fear of criticism that kills creativity.
To that end, each group then received two random words or phrases, which had to be combined into a product of some kind — no matter how outlandish. The product could be anything imaginable.
One group of high school students selected “musical instrument” and “food preparation.” Right away, ideas began to fly. Blurting out ideas as they came, the girls began to sketch ideas on paper, from a trumpet that boils water to a clarinet that doubles as a seasoning tool. (The girls decided to call their imaginary company “Dinnertainment.”)
Riley Hageman, a freshman at Lakeland High School, admitted she had thought the workshop would be dull. She didn’t expect to draw and create in a collaborative setting.
“I thought we would watch a slideshow,” she said with a laugh. “But this is fun.”
Her fellow Lakeland High School freshman, Zoe Gephart, said the open-ended nature of the task made it easier to cook up ideas quickly.
“It’s such a broad range,” she said.
The real goal of these exercises, Cummings said, is to encourage the participants to examine problems with a different mindset than usual — not just in the workshop, but in their daily lives.
“It’s really interesting for me to see the girls get so excited,” Cummings said. “When they leave, they’re much more open minded, without worrying about criticism. They’re willing to try and look at things differently.”