Since I consider myself an entrepreneur in the making, this experiment was especially interesting to me. I’ve battled with the thought of trying to invent something before. You know, like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuck…wait, I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? Yeah, I’m going back to my comfy place. It’s much easier to let our ideas get lost forever than to take a risk and make those visions explode. I’m not afraid to take risks, though I’m not assertive enough at times. I tend to be my own worst enemy most of the time, and I am the reason for my own stumped creativity.
Our group had the task to create something new. It might not have been a brand new idea, but we had to be the firsts to bring that idea to life. We had so many wonderful ideas (well, they did, I had my “stumped creativity” moment). I wanted to try them all, but most of them seemed too hard to complete in an hour and a half. We decided we wanted to create something that would allow us to play Dance Dance Revolution as a group. From the start we were all about teamwork and we wanted to create something that would be enjoyable for us all. We had our frustrating moment, as I’m sure most groups had, where we couldn’t make it work. The copper wire was not working at all, so we could do what we wanted with the controls that we made out of paper and big arrows.
We had so many fun ideas, like making a dart game, social networking thing, maze, universal remote for phone, light, etc., twister, something about fake, sizzling meat, and jeopardy. We were able to eventually do something awesome as a group- play Super Mario bros. We made a single-player game into a multi-player game. We had a great thing going till we were reminded that creating giant controls for playing a game was not the objective. So we decided to attempt to create single touch controls for Microsoft Word for functions such as: save, copy, paste, find, undo, redo, and we were going to use the space bar as the ctrl button. We would need hours to be able to properly program this since it was a complicated process that we did not understand. But the concept was a great one.
That’s the thing. All you need is a concept, and then effort to make it work. We tend to limit ourselves to what is already done, and just mimic others’ creations and ideas. We have infinite abilities to create anything we want. Just like writing. The first paper was not as easy as people are accustomed because we had to create a thesis from scratch. We had to reach into the back of our minds to find something we’re truly passionate about and attempt to create a masterpiece. Just like my creative stumps, we all have blocks where we cannot figure out what to think, let alone write. When you finally get out of that hole that you’re in, you are able to see that bright light again (light bulb above your head, ding!).
We came in thinking we could make it so that when someone touches the door knob, the lights would go on or off. We ended up making controls for the arrows on the keyboard to play Super Mario instead. I imagine Bill Gates probably did this as well. This is how I image a day at Microsoft going (the early days):
Bill: Hey guys, let’s go to the office to create that billion-dollar PC idea we got in mind.
Guys (maybe Jobs included?): Yea Bill, sounds like a great plan.
(2 hours later at the office): Bill and the guys end up playing Spider Solitaire and seeing who gets the higher score playing Minesweeper (how the heck do you play/win that game? I could never do it).
Okay, so let’s be real. Bill wasn’t fussing around like we were, but I’m pretty sure he had those moments where he just wanted to relax and play mindless games. Why not do it the fun way by playing Super Mario as a team? 😉
