Critical and Creative Thinking Skills - Session 4 Notes

Creativity and Problem Solving

  • Creativity: is the ability to generate original ideas or solve problems in novel ways.
    • Creative individuals often use divergent thinking, which involves:
      • Generating multiple and novel responses to problems or questions.
      • Displaying cognitive complexity, meaning:
        • A preference for elaborate, intricate, and complex stimuli and thinking patterns.

Divergent Thinking vs. Convergent Thinking

  • Divergent Thinking
    • Example: Brainstorming activities to generate more ideas.
  • Convergent Thinking
    • Example: Analyzing data to identify trends or patterns.
    • Example: Scientists conduct experiments to find the best possible answer to a problem.

Assessment: Discussion Forum 1

  • Objective
    • To apply critical and creative thinking in their everyday experiences.
  • Exercise:
    • Scenario: Working in a customer relation department with a task to generate new ideas and approaches to develop a new process for handling customer inquiries or improving the overall customer experience.
    • Task: Choose between divergent or convergent thinking and justify the choice.

The Tower of Hanoi

  • The way people go about solving puzzles helps illuminate how people solve complex, real-life problems.
  • Psychologists have found that problem solving typically involves three steps:
    1. Preparing to create solutions
    2. Producing solutions
    3. Evaluating the solutions that have been generated.
  • The classic Tower of Hanoi puzzle is a good way to illustrate the process.
  • The goal of the Tower of Hanoi puzzle is to move all three disks from the first post to the third and still preserve the original order of the disks, using the fewest number of moves possible while following the rules that only one disk at a time can be moved and no disk can cover a smaller one during a move.

Arrangement Problems

  • Arrangement problems require the problem solver to rearrange elements in a way that will satisfy a certain criterion.
  • Activity 1: Rearrange the letters in each set to make an English word.
    1. ERET
    2. LSSTNEUIAMYOUL

Problems of Inducing Structure

  • In problems of inducing structure, a person must identify the existing relationships among the elements presented and then construct a new relationship among them.
  • Activity 2: What number comes next in the series? 1 4 2 4 3 4 4 4 5 4 6 4…

Assessment: Discussion Forum 2

  • Objective:
    • To apply different ways of thinking to a problem and then use convergent thinking to choose optimal solutions.
  • In this forum post your answer of the previous problem-solving activities (The Tower of Hanoi, Arrangement Problems, and inducing Structure). You can ask your colleagues how to answer the problems or share how you worked out and find solutions to the problem.