How to Leverage the Knowledge Spiral and Creative Meta-rules to Train on TRIZ Thinking While Rescuing the Sinking Titanic?
After a first experiment presented to TRIZ Future Conference 2012 which objective was to teach simultaneously future teachers and students of 2 classes of a technical college, this paper will present a proposal which aims at extending the experiment to a larger group made of 10 colleges, 24 new teachers and about 300 students (compared to 1 college, 6 teachers and 60 students). To resolve the tackled problem (how to train without being trained) a specific pedagogy, named as "knowledge spiral"
... s been proposed and tested and has brought interesting benefits. The matter is that while the number of people to be trained is enlarged, the number of resources is not extending. To the contrary it is even more restricted, and new constraints have to be considered: How to apply a pedagogy when the number of students is enlarged, could we used the same pedagogy, and how to adapt it? How to leverage the "knowledge spiral" with limited resources: especially less time to develop the competences? How to apply the "knowledge spiral" with geographical separated resources within the same time frame? In these conditions, the new proposal could not be a direct homothetic transformation of the previously proposed one. Thus, a new model, again inspired by the "knowledge spiral" has been developed with the introduction of a fourth level of resources: expert, trained teacher, non-trained teacher, and student. This will, in a certain extent, enlarge the spiral. Another aspect, due to the new constraints, is the use of a generic problem to be solved for all the trained groups, this problem being used both to trained the teachers and proposed to students as a school case study. The case study will emphasizes the different concepts of TRIZ (contradictions, I.F.R., available resources, specific conditions...). This implies the expert to describe both the case, the method to solve it, and also to define the border of the case in order to make it understandable and usable for teachers (without the expert), but without restraining the domain of possible solutions for learners (both teachers and students). To fit these requirements, the proposal was to give teachers the meta-rules of a creative game, these meta-rules enabling the game to be applied in any context.