Did you know brainstorming is the art of critical thinking to arrive at the best ideas and outcomes? Yes, right from making a shopping decision to innovating new products, brainstorming plays an important role in life. As brainstorming is required in most events of life, high schoolers are more likely to benefit from this skill. High schoolers are on the edge to step into the world and explore different career paths. Now, that’s when they require brainstorming to analyze options, innovate solutions, and modify problems into opportunities.
In order to practice this skill, Brainstorming activities are considered to be the ideal options to choose from. While carrying out these activities, students are more likely to express their views which enables them to practice and build self-advocacy.
If you wish to build self-esteem and involve higher participation from students, below are some brainstorming activities that are an ideal combination of creativity, analytical thinking, and accepting individual differences.
How can brainstorming help high schoolers?
Brainstorming is a simple and innovative mind exercise that can keep the students engaged in coming up with inventiveness and creativity in thinking. In these activities, the mind keeps working and creates an enjoyable environment even in a boring concept. This practice can be of great use to high schoolers and below mentioned points are highlighted on the same.
- High schoolers have to prepare for their further education and this is the right phase for them to learn the art of brainstorming.
- Such activities increase critical thinking abilities as the students learn to put forward their ideas after analyzing solutions.
- Individual students’ voices can meld with the group’s voice during brainstorming sessions hence, they take risks in expressing their opinions in a group filled with diverse thoughts.
- As high schoolers are to step into the world and meet different individuals, brainstorming activities teach them the importance of acceptance.
- Students also learn to respect different perspectives and ideas that might not necessarily interest them.
Engaging activities for brainstorming
1. Drop Multiple Ideas
This simplistic, easy-to-play game is great for fostering creative thinking skills. When brainstorming, this inventiveness is particularly a crucial talent because it aims to generate multiple ideas in a quick span of time.
- In this game, students are required to come up with different usage of an object or a product. For example, the teacher may show a bucket and students can drop multiple ideas about its usage.
- The students can either play it individually or be paired in teams.
- A timer is an additional element to increase competitiveness as it also checks the innovative thoughts generated within the restricted time frame.
This activity enables raw thinking essential for brainstorming. As there are no right or wrong answers, students can put forth the strangest ideas and never know if that happens to the best, most unique one!
2. Sell it to Me
You must have seen various commercials and advertisements on television and social media platforms. However, high schoolers can get exposure to the deep analytical thinking that goes behind selling a product.
- In this game, teachers should make chits of various products that cannot be sold physically. For example, stars, energy, buoyant force, or nebula blast in the universe.
- These products/aspects cannot be touched or felt by anyone.
- That’s the real twist of the game, students shall have to come up with innovative ideas to sell the natural elements of the world. For example, they can sell the feeling of love by advertising stars to the audience.
- The team with the most innovative sales pitch wins the game.
This interesting brainstorming game enables high schoolers to think extraordinarily as these things cannot be sold. Teachers can also take basic products however, students might have some exposure compared to these natural aspects of the earth.
3. Storyboarding
Storyboarding is a broad concept used in the E-learning industry. A storyboard is a unique way to draft ideas, solutions, and courses, and explain concepts to students and learners.
- In this game, the high schoolers will have to prepare a storyboard based on a topic given by the teacher.
- Give them different elements that can be of use in the process of storyboard creation. For example, they can use pictures, quotes, different examples, and infographics.
- Now, give them a topic a day before the activity starts. Each student should be given a different topic and they should bring their required materials accordingly.
- The twist is to make teams on the day of the activity so that students with different topics are now in the same team with multiple unique materials.
- Now, assign them any one topic for storyboard creation. For example – Benefits of Teamwork.
- Students should now create their own storyboard and coordinate with other team members.
This interesting brainstorming activity is a great example of team building, cooperation, and being open to new ideas. As students work with different perspectives, they learn to share and receive knowledge on multiple ideas.
4. Where is the End?
Introducing a fun brainstorming activity for high schoolers to learn coordination and teamwork. This activity is a story-based focus on building and restructuring the story.
- In this game, divide the class in groups of 3 or 4 students each.
- The teacher should begin with a random story or a title. For example, Rachel got late as she was stuck in solving a problem..
- After this, pick a random team number and ask the team to continue the story.
- The team should be given 2 minutes to think and form the plot of the story.
- As the team continues with it, stop them at any given point and pick another team to continue the story.
This game sets a competitive environment to get the best plot for the story. Additionally, all teams start the brainstorming process as they never know which team would be picked next or when the story is supposed to end. Such activity is absolute fun as the story can take turns from being funny, serious, humorous, to mysterious.
5. Think it Deep
High schoolers study different subjects and are likely to acquire basic knowledge on various topics. This game is particularly good for brainstorming as it involves aspects from different subject matters.
- In this game, make the students sit in a circle.
- Now, give them one instruction for which they should say one word aloud. For example, the names of cities in the USA.
- Students shall now start mentioning the cities one after the other. For example, New York, Boston, etc.
- As the game begins, the teacher should stop any student in between and change the instruction of the game. For example, types of books for studying math.
- Now, students start speaking their answers aloud.
- It should be fast-paced and they should not be given more than 2 seconds to come up with the answer.
This is a highly challenging game as students are likely to mess up on different topics. The game promotes critical thinking abilities as students start thinking about the answer even before the turn.
6. Find your answer
This is a simple yet unique brainstorming activity to promote an innovative environment in the classroom. Teachers can equally enjoy listening to varied and strange answers from students and their teams.
- In this game, the teachers should come up with different and strange problems and present them to students.
- Make sure these problems are a bit different than their daily life or the ongoing academic topics.
- The students are then required to state their answers and also state the purpose of their thought behind the problem.
- For example, teachers can ask similar questions as mentioned – Which 5 things will you offer to aliens if they wish to capture the earth? Why? Or If you are stuck in the school library, what 3 things would you like to steal? Why?
- With such questions, students have to think creatively and form their answers based on their intelligence and understanding.
Such an activity promotes a competitive environment where students are bound to think beyond their daily conversations. This also enables students to research more about a problem that might interest them during the gameplay. This activity can be played in teams or with individual students by setting a time limit for each.
Conclusion
Brainstorming activities are beneficial to boost knowledge and promote unconventional ways of thinking. Brainstorming techniques allow students to be free from limitations that can minimize new answers, leading to many of the finest ideas. Students also understand the importance of unity in diversity as they are active with team members who have their set of ideas and opinions.
Brainstorming is also crucial when students plan to start their careers in different fields of interest. Whether it is marketing, engineering, or any other work area, brainstorming leads to innovative ideas. Such activities also help broaden the horizon and enhance students’ critical thinking capabilities.
An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’,