When one of 4th grade teachers told met hat he wanted to make something new with his kids, I recommended him to work on a small TRIZ workshop with the class. I showed Nina’s story in TRIZ handbook and asked them if they wanted to learn about it. They shouted “Yees“.  And we started to meet one hour a week.

First, we discussed Nina’s story with chocolate and strawberry syrup and tried to describe the steps she followed. Then we started to think about examples. Ideas were great.  One kid mentioned about his ball that ran away to shruberry and pricked by a thorn. A girl told that she wanted to eat fresh fruit always but fruit were too cold when they were kept in the fridge. Another boy told that he liked playing “mangala” (a game played with small pieces of stones) at school. But the mangala stones were always lost in class. Then we formed the working  groups. Kids found a group name for themselves and thought about which problem from their daily life to work on.

The following week, they were ready with their group names, definition of their problems and drawings of their problems. Here you can see a presentation including their problem definitions and pictures of moments while they are working.

Group Well-Informed Fruit: We have fruit in fridge always but we want them to be in room temperature. But they got wormy in balcony.

Group Spies: We want to eat ice-cream in break time. But break time is not enough to finish eating the ice-cream. How can we prevent it to be melt untill the next break?

Group Everything Is Easy For Us: How can we prevent lemon to be dried?

In oncoming  session, groups discussed their definitions, aims, problem owners ,parameters and x-element.

Now, it is time to draw the resource table. And we are looking forward to see how to find the solution.  Amazingly, kids were so eager to follow the steps and help each other. I am going to tell here their end-up evaluations also. I really wonder what will they be thinking at the end.