During the last 2014-2015 academic year, Dr. Kathy Goff, Director of the Creative Oklahoma Torrance Center in Tulsa, administered the The Beyonders Program, a new digital education and research program for secondary students created by Vast Learning Systems. The program is an online, cloud-based creative problem-solving curriculum consisting of four real world problems. Participants in the program were secondary students, aged 11-18, at the Tulsa Boys Home, a residential center in Oklahoma.
The STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) based challenges included inventing, creative thinking and imagination, environmental awareness, and entrepreneurship. In the STEM-based curriculum, students applied new and previously learned information to creatively address a problem that they had not previously encountered (Roberts, 2012).
Students participated in 28 fifty-minute weekly sessions during the school year. They were digitally introduced to a variety of creative problem solving models that were applied to the local and global challenges.
The results showed that 73% of the Beyonders participants realized an increase in their creativity scores and that there were significant increases in fluency, originality, elaboration and overall creativity.
To read the full article, please visit: https://creativeok.org/beyonders-program-goff-2015/
To learn more about Torrance Center and The Beyonders Program please visit: https://creativeok.org/torrance-center/
Dr. Goff is a member of Creative Oklahoma’s cSchool, director of the Tulsa-based Creative Oklahoma Torrance Center, and is a Torrance expert having served as graduate assistant to Dr. Paul Torrance while at the University of Georgia.
Goff, K. and Guzik, E (2013). Vast Creative Abilities Indicator (VCAI): A Cloud Based Assessment for Creative Ability
