The Cycle Courier Challenge

The Cycle Courier Challenge is an experiment in creativity that I've been messing with for some time for inclusion in a new book, Storycraft. There's a pretty decent KS4 lesson in this blogpost. Feel free to give it a go and collect a whole-class worth of answers. Get them to me and I'll include them in the book if there's space.

To play, you'll need...

• a spare five minutes
• one sheet of A4 paper (or the comments box at the bottom of this post)
• a list of numbers, 1-10 down the side of your paper. 

Get settled. Ready? Good.

In this activity, your job is to list ideas in response to a scenario that’s given below. I'm going to ask you for ten of them. Before you read the scenario, though, here’s what we’re interested in – seeing when your best and most original ideas emerge. Is your first idea your favourite? Second or third? Is your tenth idea your most original? Or are all of them, in your opinion, terrible?

So as you list your ideas you must do it chronologically, in the order you get them. Be completely uncritical. If a bad idea springs to mind, record it. If all ten are bad in your opinion, that’s fine.

Now for the scenario. Think of the cycle couriers you see in all towns and cities. They usually zoom around on their bikes weaving in and out of traffic. Their bikes have large square delivery boxes on them, usually because they’re ferrying takeaway food like pizza.

Now consider this. What if every cycle courier in your nearest town or city looked as if they were delivering fast food, but really it was a disguise…and they were delivering something else entirely?
What could the something else be?

OK – you’re off. Make a chronological list of possibilities:

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

Now that you’ve made your list you might want to consider the following:

1. Give every idea a score between 1 and 5. Then design and plot a simple graph to illustrate where your good ideas came – early, late or somewhere in the middle?
2. Just choose your favourite idea – the one you consider the best and most original. Then pick your least exciting idea. Where did the best and worst ideas come in the process?

These two activities should give you a chance to reflect on when your best ideas come. Straightaway… or with persistence? Have a look at my responses and see what you think:

1. Guns
2. Coffee
3. Party cakes
4. Smuggled pets
5. Bricks
6. Chopped-off Heads
7. Stakes for killing vampires
8. Doorways to other worlds
9. Universes
10. A very slow prison break – one limb at a time.

I reckon some of these a pretty good, but most are terrible. If you've got a list of responses in front of you, perhaps from classmates, look for patterns in the responses. You might want to consider choosing one of the following investigations:

1. Call answers 1-4 are ‘early answers’. What are the characteristics of early answers? What ideas do our imaginations generate at the beginning of a challenge? Answers 5-7 are ‘middle answers’. Answers 8-10 are ‘late answers’; are there particular characteristics of answers as the challenge goes on? Where are the best answers most commonly found in your opinion? Are there exceptions to this?
2. Why are the good ideas good? It doesn’t matter where they appear – collect the answers you consider to be the best. Then try and describe why they are successful.
3. What characterises weaker ideas? Collect together all the ideas that seem familiar, dull or uninteresting. Why don’t they work? 
4. Generate a list of rules for yourself about idea generation. Storyboard artist Emma Coats helps make movies for Pixar. She’s responsible for the hugely popular ’22 rules of storytelling’, an online article that has been read by millions of aspiring writers. Rule 12 is “Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.” Do the results of the Cycle Courier Challenge support this advice?

That's it. Enjoy!