Creating,+imagining,+and+innovating

**//Creating, Imagining and Innovating//** - Have you ever said “I can’t draw” or “ I was never any good at math” or “I can’t sing”? It doesn’t matter. You can still create and innovate – find a way.

I always thought that creativity was about artistic skills, and I never knew that creating your own experiment was also considered as creating, imagining, and innovating something new. Because I thought that creativity was what I lacked, I tend to leave the job of creating something to other members of the group.I never thought that science required creativity. In the field of science, creativity is about scientists designing and creating their experiments to test and verify their hypothesis. Even if I'm not creative in terms of art, I learned that I am creative enough to create and design my own experiments. For the Kinetics unit, we were to investigate the rate of a reaction and how factors affect the rate by carrying out a contolled experiment. Previously, we learned that temperature, particle size, and concentration all affected the rate of reactions. In the information about this investigation, it talked about how to measure the rate changed by particle size (surface area) and the concentration but not temperature. Therefore, to differ from the rest of the class which investigated on the concentration and the surface area effects, my group decided to investigate how temperature affected the rate of reaction. We designed an experiment and used a combination of the measuring methods. Although this is slightly different from innovation and imagination, my group created an experiment that was special since no one else did it (the packet said that it was important to keep the temperature of the reaction mixture constant). In this experiment, I learned that it is important to sometimes think, "what would happen if i didn't follow the traditional way of measuring surface area and concentration, what would happen if i measure the temperature instead?". It was important to think in all dimensions, which helps me to be more creative and innovative.



//The future is not some place we are going to but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination. John Schaar//