What is Brainstorming?
Once all information has been gathered about the scope and constraints of the project, and enough research on the interests of the user base has been conducted, brainstorming can begin. During brainstorming, the design team attempts to come up with as many potential ideas as possible. During this stage the important thing to remember is that there are no bad ideas! The goal is to put a wide variety of approaches and solutions on paper so that they can eventually be condensed down to just the best ideas. Furthermore these ideas don’t need to be fully fleshed out, once the best solutions have been chosen, the details of how they will function can be explored more fully. It can often be easy to find get stuck on an idea and end up producing a lot of similar concepts in a brainstorm. If this occurs it is important to focus on producing other ideas and keep brainstorming.
Our team considered a variety of ideas using pinball games, mazes and a variety of other types of toys, covering a number of STEAM concepts.
Once enough ideas have been produced, focus can then be shifted towards condensing these ideas down in to one singular idea. The team first condensed all of these ideas down to three: the cube maze, the gear maze and the water cycle pinball game. The team quickly concluded that the cube maze would most likely end up being too complex to implement leaving the latter two ideas. The gear maze seemed like an easy to implement idea with lots of potential for a fun game however it lacked a clear STEAM concept. The water cycle pinball game on the other hand had a clear STEAM concept which was relevant to the age group of 4 to 10 defined by the project’s constraints, however the pinball setup was rather unoriginal and could have been difficult to implement. The team determined that these concepts could be merged together by taking the best parts of each idea and forming a new idea thus concluding the brainstorming portion of this project with the plan of designing a gear maze which teaches the water cycle.