​Anjali Phadke's P​ortfolio

This year as a 9th grader at the Dayton Regional STEM School, I am proud to say that I have grown in the quality of creativity. What is the definition of creativity? www.dictionary.com states that the definition of creativity is “the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination. “ To me, creativity is simply, creating a new idea/concept every time you use the quality. What I mean by this is, if you were to participate in the exact same activity 2 or 3 times, I believe the definition of creativity would be how different each activity was performed. The brain is a wonderful organ, and its neurons are firing tons of signals per second. Creativity comes from these neurons as different thoughts come in the mind and the activity is then performed in a different way. That is my definition of creativity.  This skill, creativity, is especially important at the Dayton Regional STEM School. This school doesn’t limit what each person can do, so creativity really lets people shine. What I mean by this is that each person is different. Every person has new ideas that make them different from one of their peers. So with all the project based learning we are doing, our teachers let our imaginations run wild in terms of creativity. We are able to express ourselves in a lot of different shapes and forms. We can express ourselves through text, pictures, and even while presenting. I’ll prove how I have grown in the skill.

 

One class I have achieved this growth in is the most obvious choice for creativity, Art. Yes, this class may seem like it is always possible that two paintings seem different than one, but I guess I came to this realization a little later than most people. One example is the stencil printing we did for Art. I’ll lay out the scene for you. Imagine me, with my head tilted towards the left. After I cut out the stencil and was ready to print, my mind automatically came to the realization that I should just print my face (with ink through the stencil) in the middle of the paper. Now, after I printed my first print, I thought I was done and I didn’t have to work for the rest of the class. During that class, I came to the realization that I could do more with my Art. I came to this realization because I was thinking about another idea. Maybe I saw blue, purple, and red on the walls, or maybe I saw a heart, but my final print was 2 prints of my face, one red and one blue with varying shades of purple ovals in the middle of the two prints. This just comes to show that creativity can come to you even when you have done the exact same thing before.

 

Another class in which I have grown is Conceptual Physics. In this specific class, I have only done two professional presentations. But throughout all of my classes, I have done enough presentations to know the technique of finishing one, or so I thought. In Physics, we created a presentation (Prezi or PowerPoint) about the main topic of Chemistry. Because of my prior knowledge, I knew that I had to pick the design of the presentation first. So, I picked a boring red background with a few cool fonts and I started adding my content in the slide. After a couple of days, I found out that my presentation had been deleted and I had to start all over (albeit I didn’t have that many slides finished). My realization of starting fresh and creating a brand new theme came almost immediately. Again, I don’t know if I saw the color blue, or if I was thinking about circles, but my ultimate theme had to do with both of those things. Doing the exact same activity, with different products in each activity happened during this class, which is my definition of creativity.

 

I know that there aren’t always going to be situations in the future where I change a Prezi background or recreate an Art project, but in the medical field, this will be especially helpful. I want to be a pediatrician when I grow up. Currently, I do know if I want to pursue surgery or not. But if I do, there may be different problems with each patient. I could do the same surgery (let’s say an appendectomy) many times and still have to be creative in every surgery. A patient could be allergic to a specific medicine, so being creative and trying to find other solutions is necessary. In conclusion, I have grown in creativity this year, and creativity is important outside  and inside DRSS.