Program for Enlightened and Productive Creativity Illustrated With a Moiré Patterns Lesson

Combining both the Western perspective of creativity as productivity and the Eastern perspective of creativity as enlightenment, a Program for Enlightened and Productive Creativity (PEPC) for teaching inquiry was devised. The PEPC describes stages through which a student is guided to solve a problem using increasingly complex observation, inquiry, and experimentation. The use of this model in teaching is illustrated through a physics lesson of moiré patterns using overlapping patterns found in our everyday life. A case is made that PEPC can be applied to teaching general students, as well as gifted students, and in different content areas.