Thinking outside the blocks (yes “blocks,” not box)

Innovation is often made up of variation on existing ideas, patterns and technologies. But every once in while, something really original comes along that makes you think twice about how we approach our craft.

Enter, Siftables. Have you seen them? Very cool. Check out the video below.

It would be fun to put this idea in front of a bunch of instructional designers and see how they might propose using Siftables for common training tasks. I like the examples they show in the video, but can you come up with some more ideas for how they could be used creatively.

If you do, please leave a comment to this blog message sharing your idea.

I’ll start off. For teaching history, what if you let learners reconstruct a timeline in the right sequence. When they move them out of sequence, perhaps an outcome block on the far right of the timeline could predict how the outcome might have changed given the change in sequence. Perhaps other alternate events could be shuffled in to see the change that might occur. How fun would that be?

You ideas?

P.S. How coincidental that the inventor is named “David Merrill?” — same name as one of the instructional design greats.