Visual spatial skills are in demand. You can (and should) grow this area of the brain, and there are all sorts of games and activities you can play/do to improve it. Design thinking is a process/skill everyone is discussing these days and the visual spatial part of your brain is the key to opportunities in a service-based/knowledge-based economy. Learn more because it will take a bit longer for robots and machines to learn how to be creative and generate original thought!  Learning and creating gives you energy and power. Design your own future! 

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• Arvind Gupta's Toys From Trash (and his TED Talk) 

• Home Styler software for budding architects

• Puzzles, tangrams, read maps, play Tetris (or buy a Tetris cube), origami, play instruments

• Magnetic construction set,  or a Skallops starter set

• 200 Piece Wooden Plank set

• The PURO Create & Build game is a fabulous creative tool. It's a set of 66 colorful, cardboard pieces (squares and circles). It is hard to find, as the creator has discontinued it.  It is a beautiful concept, and you can find it on auction sites. 

• Teach yourself mental math (find videos online, take an abacus course online)

• Create a building challenge for yourself. This mansion took 50 hours to build.

• Contests like those on Architecture Lab's site

• Dwell magazine

• Design Thinkers Academy

• Stanford's D-School

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Design Competitions

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• Rubberband Contest

• Invention Convention

• Life is Good T-shirt Design Contest

• Discover Design Competitions

• F1 in Schools   additional resources for F1 car design competition on F1 Autodesk 

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Graphic facilitation is a fantastic skill to have. It trains you to listen to information, convert it to a visual, then allow you to arrange it on a piece of paper or in a notebook. This is especially helpful if you are a creative and find school lectures boring. Spice things up by doodling your notes. Explain to your teacher that this is a more efficient way for you to memorize content. Some even pursue it as a profession. Below are some books and websites that can help you build this incredible skill (and it does wonders for someone trying to build comfort with the creative process). When searching for doodling samples, look for Twitter accounts for those who are graphic facilitators (also use words like sketchnotes, visual note taking, etc.), or use Google images to pull up sheets of doodles. 

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Graphic facilitation/sketchnoting/visual note-taking websites:

• Doug Neill's Verbal to Visual site has plenty of options, his 50/50 Visual Rule

• Sketch Note Army

• A 52-minute starter class on SkillShare

• Great "why take notes in class using doodles?" video

• Napkin Academy's "How to Draw Anything"

• Sketchnote examples taken from lectures

• How to take visual notes on an iPad

• Developing your font

• Lengthy article on sketchnotes/visual note-taking

• Sunni Brown video whose TED Talk helped unleash the craze  

• More help with sketches

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Books: 

 

Sketchnotes, by Mike Rohde (http://rohdesign.com/sketchnotes/) If you order his book, be sure to buy the version which comes with 70 minutes of digital instruction (might have to order it used). 

Rise of the DEO, by Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland

A list of books recommended by Stanford's d.school 

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There are MANY others - enjoy the search. 

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