iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

"When I go home, I’m no longer a dad. I transform into a sidekick to the world’s coolest superhero. I become a nurse to a stuffed animal surgeon. I get to help an architect and a builder in forts made from couch cushions. I become second in command on a pirate ship made of the swing set. I morph into a lab assistant to an always-curious scientist. I turn into an astronaut in a planet in our backyard.

That’s the power of imagination."

“Without imagination and investigation of ideas our collective fund of knowledge would languish. We do need assessments to determine what students learn and understand, but we can incorporate imagination in the creation of those assessments to insure that students’ creative thoughts and higher executive functions are incorporated into their assessment experiences,” said Dr. Judy Willis in Planning For Creativity: 4 Simple Strategies You Can Master. Creativity should be encouraged alone with technical knowledge since the two go hand in hand.

And maybe more importantly, creativity infuses life with a different sort of depth and richness. As Osho said, “To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.”

Imagination might be vital to a clear mind, but it’s not something that’s widely taught or understood, especially among older students. In a 2007 study of prospective teachers, 68 percent said they believed students needed to focus on memorizing the right answer rather than thinking imaginatively. In his improbably popular TED talk on creativity and schools, Sir Ken Robinson said that humans are born with creativity and “we get educated out of it.” Jenny Smith, who graduated from Millburn High School in 2013, said that her secondary school focused singularly on academic benchmarks. “No one really cared about trying to develop our imaginations,” she said. “There was a curriculum, and they stuck to it.”

People often tell children to use their imagination when approaching a task, which comes from the understanding that imagination is a kind of hotbed of potential for learning and creativity in humans. I often give that advice in my own classes, and that was what led me to study imagination in the field of psychology.

What exactly happens when you imagine? There are various explanations. One idea is that when an individual absorbs information, it is likely that some aspect of that new unit of content will be perceived through visualization by an internal mind’s eye. Research has found that individuals engaged in simulation often report imagery or what is called seeing with their mind's eye.