What This Assignment Is Actually Testing — and Why Summary Posts Fail

The Core Task: Reflective Storytelling Connected to Theory and Real Examples

This is not a book report on Chapter 1. It is not a summary of what the three practices involve. The assignment asks you to tell a story — your story of engaging with the activities — and then connect that story to two external videos and to Sawyer’s eight-step Zig Zag framework. Posts that describe the practice instead of narrating the experience, or that summarize the videos instead of making genuine connections to their own engagement, miss the assignment’s core purpose: showing that you learned something about your own creative process by doing the activities.

There are four distinct tasks stacked inside this prompt. First: explain why you chose the practice you chose. Second: narrate the experience of doing the activities — what happened, what you thought, what you noticed. Third: connect that experience to the Shopping Cart Project video and the Creative Thinking Project videos. Fourth: imagine how participants in those videos might relate their work to all eight Zig Zag steps. Each of those is a different intellectual move. Posts that handle only one or two of the four typically lose points on the rubric dimensions that correspond to the missing tasks.

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The Assignment Says “Tell a Story” — That Is an Instruction About Format

A story has a narrator (you), a sequence of events (what happened as you did the activities), a moment of realization or shift (what you learned), and a connection to something larger (the videos, the eight steps). A list of what each activity involved is not a story. A paragraph explaining the Ask step in Zig Zag is not a story. The story format is what allows your peers to engage with your post — they can respond to a specific experience, a specific observation, a specific moment of difficulty or surprise. Give them something concrete to work with, not a description of a framework they also just read.

The individual vs. collaborative question also matters. The assignment says activities may be completed individually or collaboratively. If you worked with others, the story of how the collaborative dynamic affected the process is part of the material. If you worked alone, the story of your internal process — where you got stuck, where you surprised yourself — is the content. Either way, the experience is the raw material. The story is the form. The videos and the eight steps are the analytical layer you place on top.


Choosing Which Practice to Write About — and Why That Choice Shapes Your Whole Post

You only write about one practice. The choice matters because each practice has a different structure, produces a different kind of experience, and connects to the videos and eight steps in slightly different ways. Choosing based on which one you find easiest to describe is reasonable. Choosing based on which one produced the most interesting or unexpected outcome for you is better — because the post that surprises you is the post that will be most interesting for peers to read and respond to.

First Practice

Find the Question

Best for students who naturally gravitate toward questioning and problem identification. This practice focuses on the Ask step — generating better questions rather than jumping to answers. The story opportunities are: what questions surprised you, which felt forced, how questioning changed how you saw the problem. Connects naturally to the Shopping Cart Project’s early phase of observation and question generation.

Second Practice

Search the Space

Best for students whose experience was about exploring a problem from multiple angles and discovering how large the solution space actually is. Story opportunities include: what angles you hadn’t considered before, where exploration felt uncomfortable or productive, how the breadth changed your understanding. Connects to IDEO’s research phase in the Shopping Cart video and the Look and Learn steps of Zig Zag.

Third Practice

Transform the Problem

Best for students whose most notable experience was reframing — discovering that the problem they started with was not the actual problem, or that restating it completely changed what solutions seemed possible. Strong story potential if reframing produced a genuine shift. Connects most directly to the Zig Zag principle that creative breakthroughs often come from changing the problem, not solving it as originally stated.

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Choose the Practice That Gave You Something to Say About Your Own Creativity

The assignment ends with a requirement to connect your experience to what you learned about creative problem solving. That means your chosen practice needs to have taught you something — even if what it taught you is that you resist certain creative strategies, or that you defaulted to familiar approaches when the practice pushed for unfamiliar ones. A post built on genuine self-observation is better than one built on a smooth, uncomplicated account of doing all the activities successfully. Struggle and surprise are more interesting — and more analytically useful — than neat completion.


First Practice

Find the Question: Activities centered on question generation — moving from the first obvious question about a problem toward deeper, more generative questions that open up the problem space.

Find the Question — What Your Story Needs to Cover

The Find the Question practice is built on one of Sawyer’s core claims: that creative people ask better questions, and that asking better questions is itself a skill that can be practiced. The activities in this practice push you to identify the questions underneath the obvious question — to peel back the surface statement of a problem and find what is actually being asked. Your post should narrate what that process felt like for you, not describe what the process is supposed to feel like in theory.

The Story Your Post Should Tell — Key Narrative Moments

When you sat down with the activities, what was the first question you generated? It was probably broad and obvious. That is normal — it is the starting point, not a failure. The story starts there: what was the problem you chose, what was your first question about it, and what happened when the activity pushed you to generate more questions?

The analytically interesting part of the Find the Question narrative is usually the moment when you ran out of obvious questions and had to dig. That discomfort — “I don’t know what else to ask” — is where creative questioning actually lives. If you hit that moment, it belongs in your story. If you didn’t, that is also worth noting: it might mean the problem you chose was already well-defined, or it might mean you need a different kind of prompting to get past the obvious.

Questions That Tend to Open Problems Up

  • Why does this problem exist in the first place?
  • Who is affected by this, and how is their experience different from who I assumed?
  • What would change if we didn’t solve this at all?
  • What is the problem behind this problem?
  • What assumption am I making about what a good solution looks like?
  • How would someone from a completely different field frame this?

Questions That Tend to Close Problems Down

  • How do we fix this? (Goes to solution immediately)
  • What is the best approach? (Assumes a fixed problem definition)
  • Who is responsible? (Focuses on attribution, not understanding)
  • What has been tried before? (Anchors to past solutions)
  • How much will this cost? (Constraints before problem definition)
  • What does everyone agree is the issue? (Defaults to consensus)

Your post should identify what kinds of questions you naturally generated and what that reveals about your default approach to problems. That self-observation is what Sawyer’s Personal Creativity Assessment is designed to surface. You don’t need to formally report your assessment scores — the story of the practice is your data.

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If You Worked Collaboratively — The Dynamic Is Part of the Story

If you completed the Find the Question activities with others, the questions generated by the group are different from what any individual would have produced. That difference is analytically useful. Were there questions you wouldn’t have thought of alone? Were there questions you had that the group dismissed? Did the collaboration open the problem space wider, or did it narrow it through consensus? These dynamics are direct evidence of how creative problem solving works in group settings — which connects directly to the Shopping Cart Project, where a team of designers works through the question-finding phase together.


Second Practice

Search the Space: Activities focused on mapping the full range of possible approaches to a problem — resisting the impulse to fix on a single direction and instead exploring the breadth of the solution space.

Search the Space — Narrating the Experience of Staying Open Longer Than Feels Comfortable

Search the Space is about resisting premature closure. Most people — particularly people trained in academic or professional environments — feel pressure to identify the best solution quickly. The Search the Space activities push against that instinct by requiring you to keep generating possibilities after you’ve already found one that seems good enough. The experience of doing that, and what it produced, is the material for your story.

The key narrative question for this practice: did staying in the exploration phase longer than felt natural produce anything you wouldn’t have found if you’d stopped at the first viable option? If yes — what was it, and why did it only appear after sustained exploration? If no — what does that suggest about the problem you chose or your own creative process?

What This Practice Reveals About Creative Process — And Why It Matters for the Post

Search the Space is grounded in research on how expert creative thinkers work differently from novices. Novices tend to converge quickly. Experts stay in the divergent phase longer, generating more options before evaluating any of them. Sawyer discusses this in Chapter 1 as part of why the Ask step — framed broadly — is foundational to everything that follows in the Zig Zag process. If you narrow the space too early, the remaining seven steps are working with a reduced set of possibilities.

Creativity requires staying in the question longer than instinct allows. The premature answer is the enemy of the better answer — but it takes practice to recognize when you’ve settled for good enough too soon.

— Framing consistent with Sawyer’s Zig Zag framework, Chapter 1

Your post should reflect on that tension directly. Most people who do these activities find some point at which the exploration feels exhausted — “I’ve thought of everything I can think of.” The question is what happens if you push past that point. Did the activities give you techniques for generating more options? Did those techniques work? Your narrative should be specific: not “the activities helped me think more broadly” but “when I used [specific technique from the activities], I generated three ideas I hadn’t considered — specifically [X, Y, Z], and the most surprising was [Z] because…”

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Specificity Is the Difference Between a Story and a Summary

A summary says: “The Search the Space practice helped me see that there are many possible approaches to a problem.” A story says: “I started with three ideas about how to improve my team’s morning check-ins, then the space-mapping activity pushed me to think about the problem from the perspective of the newest team member rather than the manager, and that reframe generated six more ideas I hadn’t considered — including the simplest one, which turned out to be the most promising.” The first is a claim about what the practice does. The second is evidence that you did it. Your grader wants the second.


Third Practice

Transform the Problem: Activities that take the original problem statement and systematically reframe it — changing the level of abstraction, reversing assumptions, analogizing from different domains — to discover whether the problem as originally stated is actually the right problem to solve.

Transform the Problem — When the Reframe Changes Everything

This is the most cognitively demanding of the three practices, and often the most rewarding to write about. Transform the Problem asks you to take a problem you think you understand and deliberately destabilize that understanding. The activities use techniques like reversing the problem (“instead of asking how to increase X, ask what would happen if X decreased”), raising or lowering the level of abstraction (“instead of solving this specific case, what would it mean to solve the whole category?”), and analogizing from unrelated fields to import fresh framings.

What the Story Should Focus On

The most compelling Transform the Problem narratives focus on a specific moment when reframing changed what solution seemed right. Before the reframe, you were solving Problem A. After the reframe, you were solving Problem B — and the solutions to B were different enough from A that you had to reconsider your earlier thinking. That shift is the narrative heart of the practice. Without it, the post risks becoming a description of reframing techniques rather than a story of their effect on your thinking.

Three Reframing Moves to Describe in Your Narrative

Abstraction shift: Moving up (what is this a case of?) or down (what specifically does this mean in this context?) in the problem statement. Note whether moving up or down opened more possibilities — and why.

Assumption reversal: Identifying a constraint or assumption built into your original problem statement, then asking what happens if that constraint doesn’t hold. Which assumptions turned out to be genuine constraints? Which turned out to be invisible choices you hadn’t examined?

Domain analogy: Asking how a completely different field would describe and approach this problem. A design problem framed as a logistics problem, a communication problem framed as an ecology problem. The analogy is useful not because it gives you the answer but because it surfaces assumptions you didn’t know you were making. Did any of the analogies you tried produce a genuinely useful reframe? Include what happened, not just what you did.

If the reframe didn’t produce a dramatic shift — if the problem looked essentially the same after transformation as before — that is also valid material. It might mean the original problem was well-framed to begin with, or it might reveal something about how you engage with ambiguity. Either way, your post should reflect on the result honestly rather than claiming a breakthrough the activities didn’t actually produce. Honest engagement with a practice that didn’t yield a dramatic outcome can be just as analytically rich as a story of creative breakthrough.


Connecting Your Experience to the Shopping Cart Project and Creative Thinking Project Videos

This is the section most students underwrite. The prompt asks you to connect your experience with the activities to both videos — not summarize the videos, not describe them, but make a connection between what you experienced in the practice and what you observe in the videos. That connection is analytical work, not reporting.

The Shopping Cart Project — What to Notice and How to Connect It

The IDEO Shopping Cart Project video documents a design team given five days to redesign the standard grocery shopping cart. It is a classic case study in applied creative process. The team moves through observation, question generation, space exploration, rapid prototyping, and iteration. Every phase of that process maps onto something in the Zig Zag framework — which is exactly what the assignment is asking you to see.

Phase in Shopping Cart VideoCorresponding Zig Zag StepConnection to Your Practice
Initial observation — team goes out to watch how people actually use shopping carts Ask + Look (Steps 1 and 3) If you did Find the Question, connect this to your own experience of asking questions before assuming you understood the problem. The IDEO team doesn’t start by solving — they start by watching and questioning. How does that compare to how you approached the activities?
Brainstorming session — team generates a wide range of ideas without immediate evaluation Play + Think (Steps 4 and 5) If you did Search the Space, this is the clearest parallel. The brainstorming session resists convergence — ideas pile up before any are evaluated. How did your own experience of staying in the exploration phase compare to what you observe in the team’s process?
Reframing the problem — the team discovers the actual problem is not the cart but the shopping experience Ask + Fuse (Steps 1 and 6) If you did Transform the Problem, the IDEO team’s reframe is a direct parallel. They started with “redesign the cart” and arrived at a much larger problem about the whole shopping experience. How does that move compare to the reframes your practice produced?
Rapid prototyping — building something quickly to test ideas Make (Step 8) All three practices can connect to this: the activities are a form of rapid idea prototyping — generating, testing, and discarding approaches before committing to one. How did the willingness to generate and discard in your practice mirror the prototyping mindset in the video?
Team dynamics — diverse group, structured process, time pressure All steps — the process is collaborative throughout If you worked collaboratively, the team dynamics in the video are directly relevant. If you worked alone, you can observe the contrast: what does a collaborative creative process produce that a solo process doesn’t? What might you have found differently with a team?

The Creative Thinking Project Videos — A Different Kind of Connection

The Creative Thinking Project videos typically feature practitioners — designers, artists, engineers, educators — talking about how they approach creative problems. These are less about watching a process unfold (as in the Shopping Cart video) and more about hearing how people conceptualize and describe creativity from the inside. The connection your post should make is between how those practitioners describe their creative process and what you experienced doing the activities.

When a presenter in the Creative Thinking Project talks about how they identify the right problem before trying to solve it, that is the Ask step. When they describe how they saturate themselves in a domain before generating ideas, that is Learn and Look. When they talk about unexpected combinations or making analogies across fields, that is Fuse. Your post should pick specific moments from the video — specific things presenters say — and show how they map onto your own experience in the practice and onto the Zig Zag framework.

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Don’t Just Describe What Happens in the Videos — Make the Connection Explicit

A weak video connection sounds like: “In the Shopping Cart Project, the IDEO team used creative problem solving to redesign the cart. This is similar to the activities in the Zig Zag practice.” That is a category connection, not an analytical connection. A strong connection sounds like: “When the IDEO team split into sub-groups to prototype different aspects of the cart simultaneously, they were doing what Search the Space pushed me to do alone — keeping multiple directions open at once instead of committing to one. My instinct in the activity was to settle on one direction as soon as I found something promising. Watching the team resist that impulse, even under a tight deadline, showed me what that resistance actually looks like in practice.” The second version shows what you noticed and what it means — not just that the video exists.


Mapping the Videos to the 8 Zig Zag Steps — What the Assignment Is Asking

The assignment’s final question is the most hypothetical: Imagine that the Shopping Cart Project participants or the Creative Thinking Project presenters took the Personal Creativity Assessment. How might they relate their work to the 8 Zig Zag steps? This question is asking you to do two things. First, know what all eight steps are. Second, apply them analytically to the videos by reasoning about which steps are most evident in each video’s participants and why.

Step 01 Ask
Step 02 Learn
Step 03 Look
Step 04 Play
Step 05 Think
Step 06 Fuse
Step 07 Choose
Step 08 Make

Chapter 1 covers Ask — but the assignment is asking you to think about all eight. Your post does not need to analyze every step in detail. It needs to demonstrate that you understand the full framework and can identify where the video participants’ work sits within it. That means picking two or three steps that are most clearly visible in the videos and analyzing those specifically, while acknowledging the full framework exists.

How to Analyze the Videos Against the 8 Steps — Analytical Angles for Your Post

Your post should pick specific steps, show evidence from the videos, and connect them to your own Ask practice experience. Don’t try to cover all eight in equal depth.

Ask (Step 1)

Where This Shows Up in the Videos

  • IDEO team’s initial observation phase — watching before solving
  • The moment they question whether the cart itself is the right problem
  • Creative Thinking presenters describing how they identify the question underneath the obvious question
  • Your most direct connection — this is the step you practiced
Learn (Step 2)

Where This Shows Up in the Videos

  • IDEO team interviewing store staff, watching shoppers, talking to experts
  • The domain saturation before brainstorming — they know a lot about carts by the time they generate ideas
  • Creative Thinking presenters talking about how they immerse in a domain before producing creative work
  • Connect to your practice: did you research the problem before questioning it?
Play + Fuse (Steps 4 & 6)

Where These Show Up

  • Brainstorming scenes — ideas that seem absurd surface before practical ones
  • The child-safety feature emerged from combining observations about kids and cart design
  • Creative Thinking presenters describing unexpected combinations and analogies
  • Connect to Search the Space — play is staying in exploration; Fuse is when separate ideas combine
Make (Step 8)

Where This Shows Up

  • Rapid prototyping scenes in the Shopping Cart video
  • The finished cart — a concrete artifact produced by the process
  • Creative Thinking presenters’ finished work — whatever they made is the output of the whole Zig Zag process
  • Connect to all three practices: the activities are themselves a form of making ideas concrete

The Personal Creativity Assessment — How to Handle It in Your Post

The assignment asks you to imagine how the video participants might relate their work to the eight steps if they took the Personal Creativity Assessment. This is a hypothetical — you are not reporting assessment data on IDEO designers. You are using the assessment framework as a lens to analyze the video participants’ creative approach.

The Personal Creativity Assessment in Sawyer’s framework rates individuals on each of the eight steps — how naturally and habitually they engage in asking, learning, looking, playing, thinking, fusing, choosing, and making. Looking at the Shopping Cart team, you can make reasonable inferences: the observation-heavy team probably scores high on Look and Ask. The rapid prototyping approach suggests high Make scores. The willingness to keep brainstorming past the obvious ideas suggests high Play. Your post should reason through which dimensions the video participants likely develop, and connect that to what you discovered about your own profile through doing the activities.

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Verified External Source: Sawyer, R. K. (2013). Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity

Published by Jossey-Bass (an imprint of Wiley), this is the primary text for the assignment. APA citation: Sawyer, R. K. (2013). Zig Zag: The surprising path to greater creativity. Jossey-Bass. The eBrary version available through your institution’s library link is the same text — cite it with the same author, title, and publisher; add the database access information if your institution’s APA style guide requires it for e-books. Chapter 1 is your primary source for the Ask step, the three practices, and the Personal Creativity Assessment. For outside academic support, Sawyer’s broader research on creativity is published in the Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (2006, 2014) — also available through academic databases — and provides theoretical grounding if your post needs a second source beyond the textbook itself.


How to Structure Your Initial Post — What Goes Where

Discussion posts for this type of assignment don’t need formal headers or an academic essay structure. But they do need a clear internal logic — a sequence that takes the reader from your choice of practice through your experience, into the video connections, and out to the broader Zig Zag framework. Here is a workable structure that covers all required elements without turning the post into a list of responses to each prompt component.

Recommended Post Structure — Four Moves in One Flowing Narrative

Opening — Why This Practice (2–3 sentences): State which practice you chose and why. Don’t be generic (“I found it interesting”). Be specific: what about this practice seemed like it would reveal something, challenge you, or connect to something you were already thinking about? One honest sentence about your actual motivation is more effective than two sentences of enthusiasm.

The Story — What Happened (core of the post, roughly half your word count): Narrate the experience of doing the activities. Include what you did, what you noticed, where you got stuck or surprised, what the activities produced, and what you learned about your own creative process. Be specific about the problem or situation you applied the activities to. The narrative should have a beginning (your starting point), a middle (what happened during the activities), and a moment of insight or shift (what you took away).

Video Connection — Explicit Link to Both Videos (30–35% of your word count): Pick one or two specific moments from each video and connect them directly to your practice experience. Don’t summarize the video — identify a specific parallel and explain what it shows about creative process. This is where Zig Zag steps other than Ask come into the conversation naturally.

The Hypothetical — Personal Creativity Assessment and 8 Steps (closing section): Briefly address how the video participants might score on the Personal Creativity Assessment and which Zig Zag steps their work most clearly demonstrates. Connect this back to your own experience: what did your practice reveal about which steps come naturally to you and which don’t? This closing move connects your personal story to the broader analytical framework, which is what makes the post academically substantive rather than purely reflective.

✓ Post That Tells a Story with Analytical Depth
Opens with a specific reason for choosing Transform the Problem — says directly that reframing is the creative move I find hardest, which is why I needed to practice it. Describes applying the activities to a real problem (a communication breakdown in a volunteer organization). Narrates the specific reframe that shifted the problem from “how do we communicate better” to “why are people reluctant to share bad news upward.” Connects that reframe to the moment in the Shopping Cart video when the IDEO team realized the problem wasn’t the cart but the experience. Closes by inferring that the IDEO team would score high on Ask and Look in the Personal Creativity Assessment — and noting that the practice showed me I score low on Ask, because I move to solutions before I’ve fully explored the question.
✗ Post That Summarizes Instead of Narrating
Opens by explaining what the Transform the Problem practice is designed to do. Describes the general features of the three reframing techniques. Says the activities were helpful in thinking creatively. Notes that the Shopping Cart Project also uses creative thinking and that IDEO is known for innovative design. Concludes that all eight Zig Zag steps are evident in creative work. References the Personal Creativity Assessment by name without connecting it to a specific observation about self or video. Never mentions what problem the student actually applied the activities to, what happened, or what was surprising, difficult, or learned.

Common Errors That Cost Points — and Exactly How to Fix Each One

#The ErrorWhy It Costs PointsThe Fix
1 Describing the practice instead of narrating the experience The assignment says “tell the story of your engagement.” A description of what the practice involves is not a story of engagement — it is a book report on Chapter 1. Graders can read the book. They want to know what happened when you tried the activities, not what the activities are supposed to do. Write in first person, past tense: “When I did this activity, I…” not “This activity helps people to…” Every sentence should describe something that happened to you or that you produced, not something the practice generally produces.
2 Not specifying the problem or situation you applied the activities to The activities require a problem or challenge to work on. If your post never names what problem you applied the practice to, the story has no grounding. Readers can’t engage with your experience because they don’t know what you were working on. This also makes the video connections harder to make and weaker when they are made. Name the problem or challenge in your second or third sentence. It doesn’t have to be a grand problem — a workplace issue, a personal decision, a design challenge you care about. The specificity is what makes the subsequent narrative credible and interesting.
3 Summarizing both videos without making connections to your practice The prompt says “connect your experience with the activities to the videos” — not “describe the videos.” A paragraph that tells readers what the Shopping Cart Project is, without showing how it relates to your specific experience of the practice, has not completed the connection task. It has added word count without analytical substance. Pick one specific moment in each video and name it precisely. Then write one or two sentences explaining what that moment shows about creative process, and one or two sentences connecting it to something specific from your own practice experience. That structure — specific moment → what it shows → how it connects — is the connection the assignment is asking for.
4 Mentioning the 8 Zig Zag steps without explaining which steps and why “The IDEO team used all eight Zig Zag steps in their process” is a generic claim that demonstrates no analysis. Which steps? At which points? With what evidence from the video? The hypothetical question about the Personal Creativity Assessment is specifically asking you to reason through how the videos map to the framework — not just assert that they do. Pick two or three steps you can support with specific evidence from the videos. Explain where in the video you see each step, what it looks like, and why you identify it as that step rather than a different one. Connect at least one of those steps to your own practice experience and what the practice revealed about your own profile.
5 Describing the Personal Creativity Assessment results without connecting them analytically Reporting what your Personal Creativity Assessment profile looks like without analyzing what it means is missed analytical opportunity. The assessment is a tool for self-understanding — the point of mentioning it in a discussion post is to use it as a lens for interpreting your experience in the practice and comparing yourself to the video participants. Use your assessment profile (or your inference about the video participants’ profiles) to make a specific claim: “My low score on the Ask dimension tracks with what I experienced in the Find the Question practice — I consistently moved toward solutions before I’d exhausted the question space, and recognizing that is the first step to working against it.” That is how assessment data becomes analytical content, not just self-reporting.
6 Not addressing what you learned about creative problem solving The assignment explicitly says “including what you learned about creative problem solving.” This is a required element. Posts that narrate the experience but never articulate a takeaway about creative process — a claim about how creativity works, what the activities revealed about their own approach, or what they would do differently — have left out a specific required component. Write one clear sentence — somewhere in the middle or toward the end of your post — that states what the practice taught you about creative problem solving specifically. Not about yourself generally, not about the Zig Zag book. About creative problem solving as a process. “This activity showed me that I close down the problem space too quickly, and that the most interesting solutions tend to appear only after the obvious ones have been exhausted” is a specific claim about creative process grounded in your experience.

Pre-Submission Checklist — All Three Practices

  • Practice choice identified at the start of the post — with a specific reason, not a generic one
  • The problem or challenge you applied the activities to is named
  • The narrative describes what happened during the activities — not what the activities are designed to do
  • At least one specific moment of difficulty, surprise, or insight is described
  • A connection to the Shopping Cart Project video includes a specific moment from the video, not just its general topic
  • A connection to the Creative Thinking Project video includes a specific moment or statement from the video
  • At least two or three of the 8 Zig Zag steps are identified and mapped to specific video evidence
  • The Personal Creativity Assessment is referenced and connected analytically — not just mentioned
  • The post includes an explicit statement about what you learned about creative problem solving
  • If collaborative: the dynamics of the collaboration are part of the narrative, not just noted in passing
  • The post is written in first person and past tense for the narrative sections — it reads as a story, not a description

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FAQs — Zig Zag Chapter 1 Ask Practice Discussion Post

How long should the initial discussion post be?
The assignment doesn’t specify a word count, which means length is governed by how fully you cover the required content. Given the four distinct tasks — why you chose the practice, narrative of the experience, video connections, and 8-step hypothetical — a post under 400 words will almost certainly be too thin to cover all of them adequately. A post of 500–700 words that addresses every required element specifically is stronger than a 1,000-word post that covers two elements in exhaustive detail and drops the others. The video connections and the 8-step mapping tend to be the elements that need the most word count because they require specific evidence from the videos and analytical reasoning rather than personal narrative. Aim to split your word count roughly: one-third for the personal story, one-third for video connections, one-third for the 8-step mapping and takeaway. If you need help calibrating length and coverage for this specific assignment, our discussion post writing service handles creative thinking and education assignments at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
Do I need to cite Sawyer’s book in the discussion post?
Discussion posts often have more relaxed citation requirements than formal papers — many instructors don’t require APA in-text citations for posts that are primarily personal reflection. Check your specific assignment instructions and course rubric. If your course requires citations even in discussion posts (many do), cite Sawyer when you name a specific concept, step name, or framework element: “Sawyer (2013) describes the Ask step as the foundation of the entire Zig Zag process” is a properly cited reference to the framework. If your course uses informal discussion conventions, you can reference the text without full APA formatting — “In Chapter 1, Sawyer describes…” signals your source without requiring a full in-text citation. When in doubt, cite. A citation that wasn’t required doesn’t cost points. A missing citation that was required can.
Can I write about doing the activities collaboratively even if most of my classmates worked individually?
Yes — the assignment explicitly says the activities may be completed individually or collaboratively. If you worked with others, your collaborative experience is the material. What makes the collaborative story valuable is that it gives you more to say about how creative problem solving works in groups — which the Shopping Cart Project video models directly. The IDEO team is a collaborative creative unit, and the tensions, dynamics, and outcomes of collaborative creativity are central to what makes that video analytically rich. If you worked with others, your post has a direct personal anchor for thinking about those dynamics. The only risk is spending too much time narrating the group dynamics and not enough connecting them to the Zig Zag framework and the videos — keep the connection to the analytical requirements in view as you write.
What if I didn’t find the activities useful or interesting? Can I say that in the post?
Yes — and you should. An honest account of why a practice didn’t work as expected, or produced less than you hoped, is analytically more useful than a post that claims everything went well. What the assignment is measuring is your ability to reflect on the creative process, not your ability to succeed at it. If the Transform the Problem activities didn’t produce a meaningful reframe, the interesting question is: why? Was the problem already well-framed? Did you resist the unfamiliar techniques? Was there a constraint in your approach that the activity surfaced? Those questions, honestly explored, demonstrate exactly the kind of self-aware creative thinking Sawyer’s book is trying to develop. The post that says “the reframing activities produced nothing surprising, and here is why I think that happened and what it tells me about my creative habits” is a stronger piece of reflective thinking than a post that manufactures enthusiasm for an outcome that didn’t materialize.
How specific do I need to be about the Shopping Cart Project video?
Specific enough that your grader can tell you watched it carefully and thought about it. “The IDEO team used creative thinking” is not specific enough. “When the IDEO team split into sub-groups to prototype different cart features simultaneously instead of choosing one direction first, they were doing what Search the Space pushed me to do — keeping multiple directions alive at once” is specific. The question to ask yourself before submitting: could this connection have been written by someone who only read a summary of the video? If yes, it’s not specific enough. If it requires actually having watched the video carefully, you’re at the right level of specificity. Pick one or two moments that genuinely connect to your practice experience and develop those well, rather than making five generic references to the video’s general theme. For help developing and writing strong video connections for this assignment, our psychology and education homework help service handles discussion posts at this level.
What problem should I apply the activities to?
Choose a problem you actually care about or are actually working on — the activities produce richer material when the stakes are real, even if minor. The problem doesn’t need to be dramatic or professionally significant. A course project you’re stuck on, a process in a job or volunteer role that isn’t working, a design challenge you’ve been thinking about, a communication problem in a team or relationship. Real problems produce genuine creative friction, which gives you more to narrate. Fictional or generic problems (“I applied the activities to the abstract problem of climate change”) tend to produce shallow engagement because there’s no real personal stake driving the questioning. The specificity of your problem also gives your peers something to engage with in their responses to your post — a specific problem is discussable; a generic one is not. Pick something that is genuinely yours and that you’re willing to share at the level of detail the narrative requires.

What Makes the Difference Between a Post That Fulfills the Assignment and One That Demonstrates Learning

The posts that score highest on this assignment are the ones where the student’s thinking is visible on the page — where you can see a person actually working through what the experience meant, not just reporting that they did the activities and found them useful. That requires a specific kind of intellectual honesty: you have to be willing to say what you actually noticed, including the uncomfortable things, rather than shaping the narrative toward what sounds like the right lesson to have learned.

Sawyer’s whole argument in Zig Zag is that creativity is not a talent — it is a set of practiced habits that anyone can develop. The discussion post is asking you to demonstrate that you engaged with that argument seriously, not just read it. The story of your engagement with the activities is evidence of that seriousness. So is the quality of your connection to the videos. So is the specificity with which you map creative work to the eight steps.

The three practices in Chapter 1 are all doing the same fundamental thing from different angles: slowing down the move to solution and staying in the problem longer. Your post should reflect that understanding — not as a paraphrase of Sawyer’s argument, but as something you experienced directly in the activities and observed in the video participants’ work. The difference between stating that claim and demonstrating it through a specific, honest narrative is the difference between a competent post and an excellent one.

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