Brainspin: What Do You See?

While at Powell's Books on a recent trip to Portland, Oregon, Angela and I were looking for a new travel game. The criteria were pretty clear: It needed to be small enough to not be a burden, short enough for casual play, able to be played by 2 people, and provide for playful interactions. That is when we stumbled across the card game BRAINSPIN.

Honestly, this is the type of game that I feel like I should have invented. It is similar in many ways to the Droodle activity that I have been using in professional learning workshops and that I wrote about in the post Want To Be More Creative?

The game consists of a deck of 54 cards each with a different simple line drawing. To play, place a card face up on the table. Use a timer to count down a minute as players write lists of all the things they see in the image. Repeat for three cards. Players then compare lists and earn points for each unique interpretation. The directions also suggest that you rotate the card in play 90 degrees every 15 seconds. This allows you to see things from a different perspective and opens up new possibilities with just the turn of a card. 

As with other creative activities like this, you can employ J. P. Guilford's four measures of creativity to assess the responses. 

• Fluency. The total number of interpretable, meaningful, and relevant ideas generated in response to the stimulus.
• Flexibility. The number of different categories of relevant responses.
• Originality. The statistical rarity of the responses.
• Elaboration. The amount of detail in the responses.

Brainspin offers a quick way to warm-up your brain and spark some creative thinking and discussion. 

​#PlayMoreGames