Methods of Teaching TRIZ Principles Through an Toy-Example

 The self-righting toy doll is known in multiple countries of the world under different names, for instance «Vanka-Vstanka» in Russian, «Darum» in Japan. The simplest self-righting toy doll is very easy to make: take a bar of lightweight material (for instance, wood) with a spherical base and attach a piece of lead to the base. The self-righting toy doll employs the principle of stable balance: its center of gravity is always below the center of swinging, that is why it is impossible to make such a doll «lie» without applying additional force. It immediately bobs up, takes a vertical position and starts swinging amusingly.

Fifty versions of a self-righting toy dolls were selected from the patent collection. In those patents, the dolls, while swinging, "draw” different geometrical figures, lie sidelong and stand on their heads, stretch their necks, bob their heads and flourish their arms, gleam, chirp and wink. In short, they do a lot of different amusing things.

(Fig. 1)

The analysis of the selected designs proved that the greatest number of patents fall on 10 inventive principles out of 40: segmentation, dynamization, spheroidicity, «matreshka» (nested doll), replacement of mechanical scheme, «a contrario» principle, asymmetry, change of color, pneumo- and hydroconstructions, change of physical and chemical parameters. This fact corresponds to the recent tendency to range examples by frequency of use (Assessing The Accuracy Of The Contradiction Matrix For Recent Mechanical Inventions By: Darrell Mann); the list of 13 most frequently used principles by Nikolay Khomenko; the teaching game «How to Solve a Problem» by Gorovits method. For the initial stage of training, it is quite enough to introduce students to 10 principles.

Each principle and subprinciple is illustrated by several self-righting toy dolls. On the other hand, different elements of one and the same doll can illustrate several principles.

How is a lesson organized at which the principles are studied with the aid of self-righting toy dolls? A teacher shows pictures of the dolls and the drawings of their internal structure. Students practice the introduced principle by proposing new possibilities of its use for the same engineering solutions and by drawing schemes of their ideas on separate cards. This is a very important advantage of this method, because the principle is mastered by practicing immediately after it is presented to students. In addition this is done in a favorable atmosphere of free creative process and not in a stressful situation of search for a solution to an engineering problem.

The students can compare their own ideas with those already patented, and to evaluate them. The group has a patent collection for self-righting toy dolls at their disposal, where each design is drawn on a separate card. When an idea of a student coincides with a patented invention which is unfamiliar to him, his self-rating grows and a new impetus to a new search is given not only to him but also to all members of the group.

The practical use of the method gave an amazing and so far unexplainable result: each student, to whom some ten self-righting toy dolls were shown and the principles used for their creation were explained, starts inventing new dolls! Not infrequently the ideas proposed by students are wittier and more interesting than those of patented prototypes. The ideas of self-righting toy dolls come in showers. This occurs irrespective of age, sphere of interest, profession and engineering background of students.

For in-depth mastering of the principle, students are given a new task - to find a possibility to use the principle for improving technical objects that are close to the self-righting toy doll (other toys). Then tasks from more distant areas come - domestic appliances, pieces of furniture, car mechanisms.

Even if the new skills of students are not used later on in the technical sphere, they all the same do good. If a person is familiar with TRIZ, in particular with the principles, he can use them for solving social problems of his family, children or collective, for removing or, even better, for preventing conflicts.

After being introduced to a series of principles, the group may pass to the next TRIZ training stage - the study of the laws and trends of engineering systems evolution.

For this purpose, a «map of laws» has been developed. The map is a large-size table with stages and laws of systems evolution. After the teacher has explained which laws of systems evolution were discovered, the students fill «different storeys» of systems evolution stages with cards where they write down all engineering solutions they know - both patents and their own ideas. The students' cards are of different color, so it is possible to immediately see who the author is. One can immediately see «white spots» on the filled table. The students who mastered the initial skills in TRIZ wonder what hinders them from filling those «white spots». Thus the mechanism of creative search and intellectual competition is triggered again.

To make the method more apprehensible and popular, the interactive game «Teach the Doll Bowing» is being developed. Besides Nelly Kozyreva, who is the author of this method and the main ideologist of the project, the team of developers includes Elena Novitskaya, designer, organizer of the project and the author of the game structure and doll appearances; Nikolay Shpakovsky, TRIZ consultant and project organizer; Andrey Mitasov, programmer, doll-animator and author of the main game concept - «teaching through teaching» (co-author of Tatyana Mitasova).