Creative-NATIONS

 

Creative-NATIONS is a project born out of a class during my master's coursework.  The assignment was to create an after school program that integrated a variety of creative thinking skills (analogizing, observing, pattern forming, abstracting, etc.) in a way that would be approachable and engaging for students.  The result was Creative-NATIONS.

 

The program tasks students with creating a nation from the ground up - while this might seem like a task born out of a social studies simulation and therefore is limited to the realm of a specific subject - the experiences designed for the program ask students to bring in knowledge and understandings from a variety of subject areas.  The result is that their overall view of a Nation is not one of being purely a "political body" or one of pure "population" or one of pure "history", but a Nation becomes an interwoven tapestry of those very connections.  Therefore as the program progresses more of the choices they make early on in the development of their nation have a very real affect on the overall picture of their nation.