Staff and students at the University of Auckland
Business School are putting the concept of
Play is the highest form of
research into action with the use of Lego Serious Play in their teaching and
learning.
The latest brick builders are students at the
2019 Summer Lab, who have been getting hands-on
with Lego Serious Play to spark
their creative thinking and test venture ideas.
Over the summer break, Summer Lab students work
in teams on a venture at Business Schools Centre for Innovation and
Entrepreneurship.
The six-week programme aims to develop students
entrepreneurial skill-sets and test out their business ideas.
Lego Serious Play gave the Summer Lab students
the opportunity to get creative and think with their hands.
Each team built
physical representations of their venture ideas, developing their teamwork
skills,
communicating in vivid ways and bringing their assumptions about their
ventures to light.
Summer
Lab participant and Bachelor of Commerce student, Yashika Khetan, says
Lego
Serious Play was the best method to demonstrate and analyse their teams
business idea.
It
keeps your creative spirit alive and thats the most important part of
innovation.
As our team started analysing what we had made, we did find some
knowledge gaps to work on.
Go, grab some Lego bricks, build an idea, analyse,
and build it again.
The University has
been embracing the use of Lego Serious Play, which is a facilitation method
used to encourage creative thinking in small group communication. With 23 academic and professional staff trained
in Lego Serious Play, and capacity to run workshops for around 40 participants,
the Lego method is being used
in strategy and operations, as well as teaching
and learning at the University.
As well as the recent Summer Lab build, the
Business School has been using Lego Serious Play in undergraduate Innovation
courses.
After the first year of using Lego Serious Play in teaching, course
facilitators are seeing
class
dynamics change as people engage differently through thinking with their hands.