Fostering Creativity and Innovation for Your Students and Yourself

FOSTERING CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION IN YOUR STUDENTS AND YOURSELF

Date: Thursday, May 22, 2025

Time: 8:30am to 4:00pm (half and full day options available)

Location: Hanahau'oli School Professional Development Center, located at 1922 Makiki Street, Honolulu, HI 96822

Cost: $75 for a half day session, or $100 for the full day

All registration options include lunch

Barry Kudrowitz, PhD is an experienced toy designer, author, and expert in how play and humor fuel innovation and design. The Case Accelerator for Student Entrepreneurship at Punahou School invites you to wrap up your school year with Dr. Kudrowitz at a morning, afternoon, or full-day workshop on Thursday, May 22nd, to learn ways to develop and teach creativity and innovation.

Creativity is important in all subjects because it leads to innovation, helps with problem-solving, and helps students be more adaptable – an essential quality in this fast changing world. Without creativity, new scientific discoveries would never be made, historians would have a hard time interpreting data to imagine the past, doctors would struggle to diagnose complex cases, and lawyers wouldn’t come up with new methods to challenge outdated precedents. Creativity also helps improve teaching methods, especially for neurodiverse students, as it can help invent new methods for engagement.

Choose from the morning session "On Creativity", the afternoon session "On Innovation", or register for the complete experience! Both sessions will integrate lessons learned from Dr. Kudrowitz’s research and will include hands-on individual and team activities. Registrants of either session are also invited to join us for lunch between sessions and coffee before the first session. 

8:30 am - 9:00 pm – Creative Coffee and Connections
Kick off the day with coffee and casual networking with fellow educators. 

9:00 am - 12:00 pm – On Creativity
The morning session will provide participants with information about the factors that contribute to an individual's creative ability and how those factors can be supported and enhanced. This will include an overview of different theories of creativity and assessments of creativity. Participants will also engage in a series of creativity assessments (and games), and evaluate assessments used to measure student creativity, appraising their different qualities, advantages, and disadvantages.

12:00 pm - 1:00 pm Lunch – Radical Innovation
Please join us for a lunch-and-learn talk on Radical Innovation. We often talk about the desire for innovation, however, change is sometimes difficult to embrace. We love incremental innovation as it is relatable and easy to digest. Radical innovation, on the other hand, can create conflict, confusion, and costs, but is important for advancing society. This talk will playfully discuss current and historical examples of both incremental and radical innovation. It will also include examples and illustrations from Dr. Kudrowitz’s book — Sparking Creativity: How Play and Humor Fuel Innovation.

1:00 pm - 4:00 pm – On Innovation
The afternoon session will focus on the factors that contribute to something (as opposed to someone) being innovative and how to support students in generating innovative ideas. A major portion of this session will be an introduction to an early-stage design process which includes learning how to frame a problem, team-based warm-up games, idea generation, idea selection, modeling, and testing. This workshop emphasizes the importance of rapid iteration, quantity of ideas, and collaboration supported by academic research. 

Celebrate the end of the school year at this fun workshop, and head into summer thinking about new ways to foster creativity and innovation in both your students and yourself!

WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES:

Participants will be able to:

1. understand the factors that contribute to an individual's creativity
2. understand how creative ability is evaluated and developed 
3. understand the factors that contribute to ideas being innovative
4. experience a design process that can be applied in different contexts to develop innovative ideas
5. learn a variety of empirically-supported idea generation methods and processes

WORKSHOP AGENDA:

8:30 am – 9:00 am: Creative Coffee & Connections:  coffee and casual networking
9:00 am - 12:00 pm: On Creativity (morning workshop) 
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm: Radical Innovation (lunch-and-learn talk)
1:00 pm - 4:00 pm: On Innovation (afternoon workshop)

ABOUT THE FACILITATOR: 

Barry Kudrowitz, PhD is an experienced toy designer, author, and expert in how play and humor fuel innovation and design. He is the author and illustrator of Sparking Creativity: How Play and Humor Fuel Innovation. Kudrowitz received his PhD from the Mechanical Engineering Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), studying humor, improvisation, creativity, and idea generationHe also received his MS of Mechanical Engineering from MIT studying projectile toy designwith Hasbro. Kudrowitz is interested in how creativity is perceived, evaluated, and learned. He has years of experience working with the toy industry and has taught toy design, product development, and creativity courses for over a decade. Read more and explore his work at www.wonderbarry.com.

THIS WORKSHOP IS DESIGNED FOR:

Any teacher in K-12 or college could benefit from this workshop in its entirety. The 2nd portion on innovation may be more appropriate for teachers of grades 3/4-12+.