She then had the idea to make the caps into fun necklaces. She attached a bottle cap to a magnet on a necklace she designed using a coloured cord. The bottle cap could be easily switched for another one with a different design. Voila! Snap Caps® were born! Maddie thought to take fifty decorated bottle caps to a local store and to her surprise, they sold out in less than two hours!

Maddie will soon be going to college and she is a millionaire. She is the owner, along with her younger sister Margot and her mom, of the company M3 Girl Designs.  They sell many Snap Caps® products across the United States to young girls who want to have some fun.  Snap Caps® can be worn as necklaces, bracelets, in hairpins, on ribbons and  picture frames. Now that Maddie is older, she has designed a new line of jewelry for teenaged girls called Spark of Life™.

What I love about Maddie is that she believes in sharing her success with others. She has written a book called “You Can Start a Business. Too!”. Who knows, maybe you have an idea percolating away in your brain and the book can help you to become a millionaire!

Lots of people around the world live in areas without a lot of modern things like computers and hospitals. But this young inventor found that the one modern thing these people do have access to is cell phones. What if she could invent a way for people to get the medical care they needed, using a cell phone?

For centuries, people used the “pinch,” the “handful,” or the “heaping cup” method of cooking. In 1896, American Fannie Farmer changed all that when she published the Fannie Farmer Cook Book. It was the first cookbook to use scientific measurements, which applied a standardized measurement system to cooking. The cookbook is still popular today, more than one hundred years later!

What does a product designer do?

A product designer is someone who creates new products to be sold by a businesses to customers. Product designers conceptualize and evaluate ideas, turning them into tangible products. The product designer’s role is to combine art, science, and technology to create new products that other people can use.

He came up with the idea for his invention after watching his friends miss easy shots. The basketball has hands painted on it to show the correct position for a player’s hands for the best chance at success. He developed his idea for an Invention Convention competition that was held at his school. Even though he didn’t win, his teachers encouraged him to get a patent. Today, his invention is sold around the world.

Presenters were given the opportunity to offer their techniques for utilizing imagination from their own particular area of expertise.

Large numbers of energized, enthusiastic people showed up for my “Gray Matters” workshop – teachers, gardeners, artists, administrators, tech folks, plenty of people “looking for more” to bring back to the workplace, or simply to gain some information about the creative process in general.

Some came with trepidation: I have no talent! We have to draw! What was I thinking!

We began right away to draw out the intensity, nervous anticipation, excitement and early morning caffeination that came into the studio classroom.

They scribbled; received more instruction, and built on the results using myriad options from the groaning art supply buffet table. What resulted was a large vibrating entity of creative people buzzing with activity. Each participant was working in a personal and unique way, some with high contrast charcoal, others with collage elements which sometimes burst out three dimensions, and so on.

It took the help of a volunteer who could wolf whistle to help me alert the crowd to incoming information. Even then I’m not sure I was able to get across exactly why the workshop was called “Gray Matters”!

We were here to dispel some common misapprehensions about creativity (as well as have art fun), among them:

1. That “talent” is required for creativity to be present.

2. And that only one person out of a bazillion has talent.

3. If you’re creative, all this talent-generated art comes streaming out of the right hemisphere of your brain. And there’s a perfect landing! No corrections necessary!

So not true! What is true, and workshop participants embodied this, is that capacities associated with right and left hemispheres of our brain complement each other. Like good partners, they take turns holding sway in their area of expertise.

Though the brain functions with constant interchange between these centers, you can attribute general strengths to each hemisphere, and utilize them in a conscious pattern.

This sequence of alternating dominance is comparable whether one is making an invention or a piece of art.

As the 10:30 end of the workshop approached I was prying the art tools out of people’s hands. Right hemisphere focus was not over, but the time was. Too short a time period, such a lot of vibrant creative art work coming out! A pleasure that could have gone on much longer. The next workshop was about to begin, we had to make room. Here come those sequences, time awareness, action plans. Yes, left hemisphere talking…sigh! Looking forward to doing this again (whole brain talking here!). Thanks to all!

I am glad that Jim Henson invented the Muppets in 1969. My favourite puppets are the Muppets – all of them, from Kermit the Frog to Miss Piggy! When my kids were little, we watched the Muppets on the television show Sesame Street. For one birthday I even gave my son Michael a Kermit the Frog stuffed doll. It was a huge hit! He even had a green t-shirt with Kermit’s happy face printed on the front.

Puppets already existed before the Muppets. In fact, puppets have been around for thousands of years. There are many different kinds of puppets – hand puppets, stick puppets, finger puppets, and string puppets (marionettes). One thing they all have in common – the puppets’ movements are jerky and stiff. Jim Henson wanted to change that. He was interested in inventing new ways of making puppets that would allow them to move in a more lifelike fashion.

In 1958, Jim Henson came up with an idea for a new type of puppet made with a soft body that would move smoothly. He applied to the United States Patent Office for a patent to protect his idea. Over time, his invention evolved to become the Muppets.

Jim Henson was born in 1938 in Greenville, Mississippi. He started making puppets when he was just eighteen years old and still in high school, for a local Saturday morning children’s television show. At college, he took a puppet making class where he came up with the first Kermit-like puppet. I’m glad he did. Even though I am adult, when I see the Muppets, I feel like a kid again, and I can’t stop smiling.

Gideon Sundback was born April 24, 1880 in Sweden. As a young man he made his way to the United States where he worked as an electrical engineer for the Universal Fastening Co. It was there that he designed the modern zipper in 1913. He fixed the problem of the zipper coming apart by adding more “teeth” per inch and putting a nib at the end of each tooth. Check out the zipper on your jeans – you can see the nibs. The nibs keep the teeth lined up with one another. He called his innovation the “Separable Fastener” and received a patent for it in 1917.

The name was changed to “zipper” much later by the B.F. Goodrich Company when it used the new “zipper” in rubber boots. Zipper is definitely easier to say. By 1937, the zipper beat out the button as the best way to fasten clothes, especially boy’s and men’s pants. Up until then pants were done up using buttons which took time and effort. Today, zippers are used to close countless things – pants, of course, jackets, wallets, school binders, and even tent flaps. I wonder how many zippers you will come across your day today!

Scientists in Scotland at the University of St. Andrews are experimenting with a flexible fabric that may just make the things it covers invisible. The fabric manipulates light. When light hits the fabric, it bends the light and sends it around the object that is covered, causing the object to not appear. The fabric is called Meta-flex.

Everything that we can see, we see because light bounces off it and comes back to us. The light then enters our eyeballs through the round black part, which is called the “pupil.” The colorful circle around the pupil is called the “iris,” and that controls how much light is let in. On sunny days or in bright rooms pupils are smaller since they want to keep your eyes from getting too much light. Too much light can hurt your eyes. On dark days or in dark rooms pupils are larger since more light is needed to see things.

The light then goes through a special part of your eye called the “lens.” It’s just like the lens of a camera or telescope! The lens focuses the light onto the back of the eyeball. This part is called the “retina.” The retina has a lot of special nerve cells that sense the light and carry signals to the brain to let us know what we’re seeing!

So you can “see” how a fabric that shoots light away from your eyes will trick you into thinking that nothing is there. There is still a lot of work to be done. Who knows, one day we might all have a cloak to hide us on those days when we don’t want to go to the dentist!

Recently I revisited Carver while revising that children’s book and preparing to teach some classes on creative thinking. Since Carver was skilled at science, art, music, teaching, I was looking for connections between all these activities, and with his extraordinary personal development as well.

What thinking process connects the artist and the scientist? Inventive thinking, or creative thinking was my conclusion. A similar sequence of thinking categorizes successful inventive thinking no matter what the field.  
I’ll relate this to creating my artwork, where it’s my work to transform the world as you see it and live in it, into one that can be seen even if it doesn’t actually exist.

For example, elderly squirrels, in “real life”, don’t give lectures on agricultural history and the nature of growing things, but…if they did, what would that look like? If you are illustrating a children’s book, you need to think about this! Then find a way to make that look convincing, or you haven’t done your job.

How do you go about this? Work from a previously acquired skill set in your chosen field. You aren’t going to be good at introducing nitrogen-fixing plants to the soil if you don’t know a peanut from a collard green.

The inventive mind working in any field takes on existing circumstances that are in need of change/transformation. The sequence goes like this

1. A transformational goal is set.
2. Possible solutions are introduced into the circumstances. These take the form of very open thinking about “what if I try this?” (aka hypotheses). Numerous solutions are encouraged!
3. Possible solutions are then tried out in some tangible form to see what happens. Such “try outs” can appear in the form of a quick sketch, outlines of a novel jotted down on a napkin, an experiment in a botany library.
4. Further development occurs if a try out works. Let’s say the sketch looks good, so a more completely rendered drawing is made. If the try out fails, another possibility is chosen.

Carver oversaw an experimental farm, and brought the try outs that worked in that botanical laboratory into the broader agricultural landscape, to farmers who could benefit from them. A piece of artwork or a botanical solution:  a simple comparison to illustrate the notion that principles of creative problem solving are similar in many fields, and can be activated in all of us, often across seemingly unconnected boundaries.