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50 Easy Brainstorming Activities, Games, and Exercises

A brainstorming exercise can be a great way to encourage team members to share their best ideas to create new and innovative solutions to a given problem. The key to effective brainstorming is to use a warm-up exercise to get creative juices flowing and encourage different perspectives. And remember, don’t judge anyone. During the brainstorming process, there is no such thing as a bad idea.

Here are 50 creative brainstorming activities for your next brainstorming session to break out of routine thinking and generate fresh ideas.

Brainstorming Warm-ups

#1. Draw Something It is a good idea to start an idea generation process in a fun way to encourage creative thinking. Drawing is a great starting point, and the idea of the game is simply to be creative.

How to Do It:

• Set a timer for one minute.
• Ask everyone in the ideation session to draw something simple and abstract (toast is a common example).
• To make the most of your time, make the drawing task related to the main problem to get everyone’s mind focused on the topic.

#2. Multi-Purpose Items This is a fun activity to encourage everyone to have an open mind and come up with creative ideas.

• Break into small groups.
• Provide groups an item like a clothes peg or paperclip.
• Set a time limit of 1-3 minutes.
• Come up with as many different uses for the item as possible.

Common Ideas

#3. Popcorn This brainstorming technique is a free flow method for coming up with lots of ideas very quickly. This is a good game to create initial ideas for later activities.

• Propose a specific problem or topic.
• Provide thinking time (usually one minute).
• Designate a note-taker to write down ideas.
• Have people call out their ideas and encourage others to respond and add to these ideas.
• Once you’ve run out of ideas, go back through the list and choose the best ones to explore.

#4. Brain Writing This is one of the most effective brainstorming techniques for generating many possible solutions and ensures that everyone has a say. Usually, due to time constraints, it will be less than ideal if you have a room full of people. Keep the group small so that everyone can participate.

• Define a problem or topic.
• Take a sheet of paper and have one person write down their idea.
• Pass the piece of paper to the next person, and they add their idea or modify the original.
• Repeat this until all group members have contributed.
• For more ideas, have multiple people write the problem in their own words so that several unique lists are created.

#5. Rapid Ideation Sometimes called “rapid writing,” “rapid ideation” is a structured version of the popcorn method.

• Set out a central problem.
• Set a time limit of 3-5 minutes.
• Have each person/team write down as many ideas as they can think of in that time.
• Once time has passed, compare notes and look for similar ideas or common themes.

#6. Mind Mapping A “mind map” is a visually connected form of free association. When mind mapping, ideas are free to grow, and the connections between ideas are visually traced.

• You will need a whiteboard and markers (or an online whiteboard).
• Start by writing down the core question.
• Set a timer (optional).
• Take turns calling out ideas/questions that are associated with the core issue.
• Draw a line between the core idea and each related point.
• Continue calling out associated ideas or questions for the core or sub-ideas.
• Continue until time runs out or enough ideas are generated.

#7. The 5 Whys The “five whys” is one of the most powerful brainstorming techniques for getting to the heart of a problem.

• Best applied in small groups.
• Take a piece of paper or whiteboard and write down your problem in the top corner.
• Regarding the problem, ask “Why?” and write down the answer.
• Then regarding the answer, ask “Why?” again.
• Repeat for five “whys.”
• Then discuss what you have learned about the cause of the issue.

Ideas to Include Quiet People

#8. Walking Brainstorm A “walking brainstorm” is a useful tool if you have enough space, such as a conference room. It is also good for addressing complex problems and ensures that everyone has an opportunity to share.

• Set up stations around a room.
• At each station, have a separate aspect of a larger problem.
• Have sticky notes available at each station.
• Individuals then quietly walk between stations, write their idea(s) on sticky notes and add them to that station.
• Allow adequate time for everyone to attend each station.

#9. Idea Napkin An “idea napkin” is a balance between producing a lot of ideas quickly and getting some depth on the ideas.

• Provide everyone with an index card.
• Set a time limit of 5 minutes.
• During this time, everyone writes down their idea and an elevator pitch.
• Have each person pitch their idea to the group.
• For large groups, break out into smaller groups to complete the task.

#10. Brainstorming with a Partner Breaking into pairs is a great approach when working with a larger group. Each pair can be assigned different aspects of the problem to solve or all work on the same problem.

• Have the group separate into pairs.
• Provide the problem to be addressed.
• Set a timer for five minutes.
• Ensure each group records all ideas, no matter how crazy they may seem.
• Compare ideas as a large group and look for common themes.

#11. Collaborative Brainwriting This is a great way to involve everyone in the ideation process while providing time for natural creativity to flow.

• In a communal area, set up a whiteboard or large flipchart and markers.
• At the top of the writing medium, write a clear problem statement.
• Members of the team/organization can freely approach the board throughout the week and add ideas or comment on others’ ideas.
• At the next meeting, discuss the ideas proposed.

Ideas for Online Groups

#12. Chat Waterfall When working with remote groups, ideas can be lost quickly in the flow of a written chat conversation, and the “chat waterfall” solves this.

• Ideal for groups of 5-15 people.
• Set up a group video chat.
• Set the theme of the brainstorming session.
• Give everyone two minutes to think quietly.
• Have everyone type their best idea(s) into the written chat, but do not send the ideas to each other just yet.
• Once everyone has written their ideas, have everyone press Send at the same time.
• Discuss the ideas.

#13. Brain Netting “Brain netting” is a great way for remote groups to brainstorm together without having to meet in real-time.

• Set up a shared online document such as a Google doc.
• Set the theme of the brainstorming session at the top.
• Allow everyone to access the file for one week and add their ideas or comments on other people’s ideas.
• At the end date, review the document for ideas.

#14. Virtual Change of Scene The “virtual change of scene” uses novelty to encourage originality in thoughts and ideas.

• The presenter should choose a background that creatively relates to the theme of the brainstorming session.
• Ideally, set a theme and have everyone set custom backgrounds to match (e.g., innovation).
• Commence your brainstorming exercise in this novel setting.
• Experiment with using a change of scene with a chat waterfall.

#15. Lightning Decision Jam This is one of the most powerful techniques for remote workgroups and can come up with some great ideas.

• In a small group, begin with the main discussion point.
• First three-minute round: Throw out as many positive points about the main issue as possible.
• Second three-minute round: Repeat the above for negative points.
• Reframe each point as questions.
• Prioritize the most urgent concerns.
• In a five-minute round, develop solutions using another brainstorming method.
• Create a matrix of solutions and weigh solutions by the ease of implementation and highest impact.

#16. Imagination Storming This method is great because it can even be done via a phone call instead of video chat. It appeals to visual thinkers and is great for product development.

• Have participants close their eyes for one minute and imagine the core topic (e.g., smartphones). They should visualize what it looks like, what it does, and how it’s used.
• Then, discuss common trends and themes of what was imagined.
• Everyone closes their eyes again for one minute. This time imagine new uses for the same thing or new features/accessories that would make it better.

#17. Random Stimulus – Version 1 “Random stimulus” is a great activity for spontaneous idea generation with online groups.

• Give each participant one minute to get an item from around their house.
• Give everyone two minutes to write down ideas related to their item.
• Now, introduce the main brainstorming topic.
• Each person has one minute to force-fit what they have written to relate to a core idea.

#18. Eight in Eight This is a version of the “crazy eights” method that can be applied online or in small groups.

• Recommend a group of eight.
• Make sure each participant has a drawing application or paper and pen/marker ready.
• Provide an issue or idea at the center of a 3 x 3 grid.
• Start a one-minute timer, and everyone must produce a drawing of the problem.
• Arrange the drawings around the central issue.
• Put one of the problem representations at the center of another 3 x 3 grid.
• Start another one-minute timer, and everyone must draw a solution to the problem.
• Complete the second exercise for all eight problems.

Visual Ideas

#19. Drawing the Problem This is a type of reverse brainstorming where participants draw pictures to represent the problem as they see it.

• Provide all participants with a sheet of paper and a marker.
• Begin by stating a general issue, e.g., “We have bad customer reviews.”
• Allow all participants five minutes to draw their representation of the problem.
• Discuss solutions openly.

#20. Draw It Out This is similar to #19, but is solution-focused. Drawing solutions can require more time than drawing the problem.

• Provide all participants with a large sheet of paper and a pen/marker.
• Begin by clearly providing a problem statement.
• Allow all participants five minutes to draw their solutions. Common approaches are:
• Draw the envisioned solution (or more than one if time permits).Draw a flowchart illustrating the steps of the problem-solving process.

#21. Drawing Off-Hand This idea is a fun and somewhat silly drawing exercise that can produce some very creative ideas.

• Set out the core issue to be addressed.
• Provide everyone with a piece of paper and pen/marker.
• Using their non-dominant hand to draw, each person draws a solution to the issue.

#22. Sticky Note Map This is a version of free-form mind mapping and is great for including quiet members of a group.

• Write the core issue/idea in the center of a whiteboard.
• Provide sticky notes to everyone in the group.
• Group members can write their idea on a sticky note and then add it to the board.
• Members should draw a line between their idea and the idea it relates to.

#23. Crazy Eights The fast pace helps to remove self-imposed limitations on creativity and discourages overthinking.

• Draw a grid of nine squares on a whiteboard.
• In the center square, write the problem statement.
• Set a timer for eight minutes.
• Take turns drawing a solution in each box around the central problem.

Creative Ideas

#24. Role-Playing Role-playing can be used to better understand a customer or user’s experience.

• You need enough participants for each role represented.
• Act out a scenario, such as a product use case.
• Treat the problem realistically, but be as creative or ridiculous as you want in other ways.
• Anyone not roleplaying can interject with ideas and comments.
• Discuss what everyone has learned about the issue.

#25. Free Association “Free association” is a simple “what comes to mind” association exercise. For this activity, participants write down everything, no matter how unrelated it may seem.

• You will need a whiteboard and pen/markers (or online whiteboard).
• Designate a writer.
• Start by writing down the core idea.
• Take turns calling out ideas/thoughts/words that come to anyone’s mind.
• Look for common themes.

#26. The 5 Senses The “five senses” technique is an effective way to brainstorm for original ideas as it involves using all of your senses.

• Close your eyes and imagine the problem you are facing (or a problem using a product, etc.) and try to experience it with your five senses: sight, smell, sound, taste, touch.
• For each sense, imagine possible solutions or ideas related to the problem at hand.
• Write down any ideas that come to you during this process.

#27. Storytelling This is good for product development or marketing teams. It involves telling a narrative about your problem and working through the scenario.

• Outline the problem to be solved.
• Best for groups of 7-15.
• Designate a storyteller in each group.
• The storyteller begins by describing a fictional narrative (e.g., about using a product that receives a lot of bad feedback).
• Other group members may ask questions, point out objections or suggest additional ideas.
• Write down a summary of your story and your group progress on the problem.
• Discuss what you have learned.

#28. Reverse Assumptions This method challenges what you think you know about an idea. It can be applied online, in groups, or alone.

• Write down the problem on a piece of paper or a whiteboard/online whiteboard (e.g., “Not enough sales.”).
• Write down what you think the problem is (e.g., “Our products are too expensive.”).
• Challenge the idea with different assumptions (e.g., “Competitors’ products are better.”).
• Continue until no new assumptions come to mind.

#29. Metaphoric Association This can be more challenging to learn than other ideas but helps generate lots of creativity.

• Think of a location, place, or object (e.g., police station).
• Try to think of what it can be a metaphor for (e.g., challenging risks/confrontation).
• Now, force this metaphor to relate to your core problem.

#30. Random Stimulus – Version 2 “Random stimulus” is a method that is designed to generate abstract creativity. Version 1 of the random stimulus exercise is included above in the Ideas for Online Groups section and is meant to be done from home.

• Before your brainstorming session, select random items equal to the number of participants.
• Pass each person an item and give everyone two minutes to write down ideas related to their item.
• Now, introduce the main brainstorming topic to the group.
• Each person has one minute to force what they have written to relate to the core idea.

#31. Writing Off-Hand This method helps with thinking with the non-dominant half of your brain and is a fun way to generate new ideas.

• Identify the core issue to address.
• Provide everyone with a piece of paper and pen.
• Set a timer of 3-5 minutes.
• Everyone writes as many ideas as they can think of with their non-dominant hand.

#32. Exaggeration This is a method designed to use absurdity to encourage creativity. By making things absurd, it’s easier to be creative.

• This works best with multiple small groups.
• Give each group an exaggeration (e.g., make it 10x as big, solve this with a zero $ budget, etc.).
• Give the groups a problem statement.
• Provide 5-10 minutes for each group to discuss the problem under their exaggerated conditions.
• Discuss the ideas generated and how they could apply in reality.

Ideas for Deep Thinking

#33. Lotus Bloom This is a technique that goes deep in search of innovative ideas, building on each suggestion to find a better idea.

• Break into groups of 3-10.
• Draw a grid of nine squares in the center of a large piece of paper or whiteboard.
• Write the central issue in the middle square.
• Try to fill out the other eight squares with related ideas.
• Repeat 2-5 times for the most promising ideas from each attempt.

#34. Six Questions This method looks at a problem from several different angles and is a popular approach to address big problems.

• Draw a 6-point star in the center of a whiteboard.
• In the center of the star, write the core topic.
• Around the points, write Who, What, Why, When, Where and How.
• Begin answering each of the questions
• If you have enough participants, small groups can be assigned to work on each question.

#35. Five Times For this method, try to rephrase your answer to the main idea/problem five times in new ways.

• This can be done as a group or individually.
• This can be used to analyze ideas generated from another brainstorming game.
• Take the central idea and write down the best solution you can think of.
• Rewrite the same solution another four times, as uniquely as possible.
• Look for how each solution might be implemented differently, even though each is based on the same statement.

#36. Stakeholder Round Robin This is a good way to come up with a large number of ideas that each fit different categories or approaches.

• Think of the stakeholders who matter to your core issue (2 is minimum, but ideally 3+).
• Before the brainstorming session, prepare a flip chart with one stakeholder listed at the top of each page.
• Set a five-minute timer to discuss the brainstorming topic from the perspective of the first stakeholder.
• Flip the chart and repeat for the next stakeholder.
• Continue until all stakeholders are discussed.
• Compare common themes between stakeholders.

Uncommon Ideas

#37. Outrageous Ideas This is one of the most creative exercises for brainstorming and is particularly good when you become stuck with other methods.

• In a group, or on your own, take a piece of paper or a whiteboard.
• Write down every idea, no matter how outrageous.
• Look at the ideas to see if any can become reality.

#38. Talking Timebomb This is a great brainstorming game and is particularly good for use with students or when you want to make a fun activity for a group.

• You will need a tool such as an online random timer (like here: https://creativetechguy.com/utilities/randomtimer) and a physical object to pass, such as a small ball or use a physical random timer (like in the Gibson Easiplay Pass The Bomb Game).
• Give the central topic or idea to be addressed.
• Set the timer to between 15-60 seconds.
• The first student starts with the timer or object.
• When the time starts, they must call out an idea or solution related to the central topic. They then pass the ball to the second student.
• The second student then also adds an idea or solution that hasn’t already been said. They then pass the ball to the next student.
• Repeat until the timer expires. The goal is not to be the person it ends on.
• For extra fun, have a low-stakes reward such as leaving 15 minutes early or a free coffee.

#39. Shiritori This is a chained word association game for groups of three or more. It is a fun way to generate a lot of ideas.

• Set a timer.
• One person starts by saying a word related to the main topic.
• The next person must say a word that is related to the main topic and starts with the last letter of the first word.
• Continue in this manner.

#40. Pushy Salesperson This game is intended to be fun while often providing surprising insights about existing products or services or when analyzing ideas from another brainstorming game.

• You need at least two people.
• Pick the product/service/solution to be discussed.
• One person has two minutes to sell the solution to the rest of the group. Like a pushy salesperson, they must continuously talk, not stopping.
• Repeat as few or as many times as you like.

#41. Like/Dislike This can be used to compare ideas generated in a previous activity or to create and compare new ideas.

• Have a group of three or more people.
• On a whiteboard, draw five columns. From left to right, label them -2, -1, neutral, +1, +2.
• Each person writes one idea/solution to the central topic on a sticky note and puts it in the neutral column.
• Have a list of 4-10 great ideas from another activity and arrange these in the neutral column.
• Each person can move up to three notes, but they can only move each note one space left or right.
• Once everyone has had a turn moving notes (voting), discuss which ideas have the greatest preference and why.

#42. The Next Big Thing This is a fun game. It is intended to be light-hearted and start conversations, but it can also be used for product idea generation.

• Provide the main issue/market to be addressed.
• Allow a certain amount of time, such as 20 minutes, for the group to quietly think of the most ambitious ideas they can. The goal is to be the next Apple or Coca Cola.
• After time is up, each person pitches their idea.

#43. Bad Ideas The “bad ideas” game is a great approach when it seems all other attempts have stalled.

• Set the core topic.
• Come up with the worst ideas possible to solve it.
• Some ideas may spur thoughts that lead to good ideas.
• If not, start working through each idea and discussing what the opposite of it looks like.

#44. 30 Circles This is designed to force participants to think outside the box by requiring a set number of solutions.

• Take a large sheet of paper or a whiteboard and draw 30 circles in a square.
• Write the problem to be addressed across the top of the square.
• In each circle, write one idea/solution to address the problem.
• Continue until all 30 are filled.
• Look for common ideas.

#45. Radaptation “Radaptation,” or “reverse adaptation” is a method that requires a lot of abstract thought. Adaptation is changing a function/feature to perform a new role. In radaptation, you take a function unchanged and apply it to an existing issue/problem.

• Think of a product or feature that is currently popular (e.g., Nike shoes).
• Now, consider what this product does in its current form, other than its core function (e.g., they look very nice).
• How can this product be used/sold for other issues (e.g., now sold as a status symbol, instead of just jogging shoes).

#46. In the Footsteps of Greatness This is a brainstorming technique intended to put participants into someone else’s shoes, usually a celebrity or someone notable.

• Before the brainstorming session, decide what the brainstorming topic will be.
• Decide what notable historical or celebrity figure’s perspective would be interesting to discuss your topic from.
• Provide both the topic and the name of a famous person to your group.
• Discuss how that person would approach your problem.

#47. What-if This approach is great for having a lot of fun while getting different perspectives on an issue, particularly if you have become stuck.

• Set a problem statement.
• Ask “What if?” and then make up your own scenario (e.g., what if this happened when we didn’t have computers?).
• Explore how different questions would be answered.
• Continue until you have enough ideas.

#48. Random Words This is a forced correlation and association game.

• Prepare a list of common words.
• Provide each participant with one word at random.
• Each person has one minute to discuss how their word relates to the main brainstorming topic.

#49. I Wish “I wish” is a similar concept to exaggeration. It removes real-world limitations from the problem-solving exercise.

• Discuss a problem statement as a group, such as “make the world’s oceans better.”
• In small groups, discuss “I wish” solutions such as “I wish there were robotic ships that picked up ocean litter.”
• Discuss the solutions.
• Are any of the solutions more achievable than they initially sounded?

#50. Yes, And “Yes, and” is a technique that is about building on what another person shares, rather than objecting to or tearing ideas down.

• Best applied after another technique has produced some good ideas.
• If no idea already exists, someone starts and suggests their best idea to address a chosen problem.
• The next person must say “yes, and” and add to the conversation without detracting from the previous statement.
• Continue until no one has anything more to add (or enough ideas are provided).

There are a lot of different ways to run a brainstorming activity. To get lots of new ideas, start with a brainstorming method that is fun and build on this with a more in-depth method. Remember, it is a creative exercise about finding original ideas. To maximize your chance of doing this, be sure to include each member of your team and try to leave choosing your favorite ideas until the end of the game or activity.

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43 brainstorming techniques and games for creating new ideas

Finding new and innovative ideas is a vital part of the growth and success of any team or organization . While brainstorming techniques are rightly perceived as creative and exciting , it’s important to find a framework and idea-generation process that empowers your group to generate meaningful results. 

Innovation is important for many businesses, but what brainstorming activities might you use to help make true innovation a reality? Find out in this collection of effective brainstorming techniques!

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In this post, we’ll explore a host of effective brainstorming techniques in categories such as creative exercises and visual idea generation games, all of which can be used to help your group brainstorm be more effective and gratifying for all involved.

We’ll also explore talk about the benefits of group ideation and share some examples of brainstorming sessions that utilize these methods. Let’s get started! 

What are brainstorming techniques?

Brainstorming is a process of enabling people to think freely and creatively when trying to come up with ideas, solutions, or sharing knowledge.

Brainstorming techniques are proven activities and frameworks for coming up with lots of ideas quickly. They’ll often include steps to shift perspective, facilitate team collaboration and refine initial ideas into something even better.

Some examples of brainstorming activities include classic mind mapping and brain writing where you quickly try to generate as many ideas as possible.

Teams often use these techniques to generate creative ideas to tough problems and to explore possible solutions . They can also be used as part of more in-depth brainstorming workshops where team members then refine and choose ideas to put into action.

Some of the core concepts of brainstorming include: reserving judgment, go for quality over quantity, listen to all ideas, and think outside of the box in the pursuit of radical new ideas and creative solutions. Bring these concepts and a proven technique to your session and you’re already on the route to success!

If you’re finding your team with a problem they don’t know how to solve, a technique that encourages creative thinking might be just the ticket! Use these activities as part of a complete workshop process to refine those ideas into something actionable.

In SessionLab, it’s quick an easy to create an effective agenda for a brainstorming workshop in minutes. Drag and drop blocks in the session planner to create your structure. Add timing for each item to ensure you stay on time. Color-code your blocks to get an instant sense of your learning flow.

Core group brainstorming techniques

Brainstorming has been around as long as individuals and teams have tried to find creative and innovative solutions, or come up with new ideas or products. Whether a group is ideating on how to solve an organizational problem or generate ideas for new features or initiatives, getting people together to quickly ideate and come up with something new is time well spent.

In this section, we’ll first explore some of the core techniques that have been used time and again to create meaningful results and great ideas.

Popcorn Brainstorming

One of the classic brainstorming techniques, chances are you’ve done a popcorn brainstorm already. It’s been used by everyone from school teachers to CEOs to generate ideas and create energy around new initiatives – much like the popping of corn in a microwave!

Start by posing a question or problem statement and invite participants to take a minutes silence to think on it. Once the minute is up, start a timer and invite everyone to contribute ideas out-loud and build on each other’s ideas too. Have a single person take notes and encourage quality over quantity: no evaluation, no criticism or discussion yet – just rapid ideation!

Brainstorming – Popcorn and Round Robin   #idea generation   #brainstorming   Simple, classic brainstorming with two variants. Popcorn – where participants speak out-loud and Round Robin – where participants work in silence and pass their ideas to the next person in turn. 

Round-Robin Brainstorming

A tried and tested idea generation technique, Round-Robin Brainstorming provides a little more structure and ensures everyone in a group can contribute to a brainstorm by ensuring the discussion isn’t dominated by the loudest voices. 

In this group method, seat everyone in a circle and hand them an index card. In silence, everyone writes an idea on their index card before passing it to the person to their left. Each participant then writes an idea based on their neighbour’s card and passes that along.

The result is a more relaxed session that encourages a combination of idea development and co-creation while ensuring everyone is heard. Perfect for teams with big personalities!

SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) is a tried and tested technique that teams often using when planning new initiatives or solving problems. It also happens to be a great tool for generating new ideas while also taking into account potential problems and opportunities.

The act of brainstorming around your weaknesses or threats can result in innovative solutions and ideas you might not have otherwise come up with. Try using each point of the process as a jumping off point for ideation or explore a topic from each of the different angles for best results.

SWOT Analysis   #project planning   #strategic planning   #environmental analysis   #planning   #issue analysis   #online   #remote-friendly   A SWOT Analysis is used in project planning, strategic planning and other processes where agreement is needed about the current situation of a project, team, department or organization. It stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

Brainwriting

No single person is as smart or as creative as a group. With the brain writing technique, tap into the ideas and approaches of multiple collaborators and co-create effectively.

Start by writing down the topic or area for which you’ll be generating ideas. Have all team members silently write down an idea related to the topic on a card and then, pass that idea to the person to their right. The receiving player reads the card and then adds an idea inspired by the original OR enhances the original idea before passing the card along.

By asking participants to grow and improve on one another’s ideas, Brain writing helps a group ideate effectively and come up with better ideas. You can even bring this to an online brainstorming session by using an online whiteboard and have participants pass post-its to the working spaces of their partners.

Brainwriting   #gamestorming   #idea generation   Some of the best ideas are compilations from multiple contributors. Brainwriting is a simple way to generate ideas, share them, and subsequently build on them within a group. Access to multiple hands, eyes, and minds can yield the most interesting results.

Question storming

Sometimes, shifting perspective and starting from a different angle can generate the best ideas. Q-Storming, or question storming invites participants to brainstorm questions, rather than solutions.

After rounds of gathering qualifying data and assumptions, ask your group to think of all those questions that they still have which might help the team think the matter through. This approach can be really useful at finding ideas your team might not have considered and ensuring that what you come up with is truly going to solve the problem at hand.

Walking Brainstorm

Brainstorming methods come in many forms – you might have a quick-fire session that encourages excitement and verbal exchanges. Alternatively, you might find your group will create better ideas by working together in a more relaxed, introvert-friendly manner.

Walking Brainstorm is designed to help large groups work on idea generation dynamically but without creating scenarios where only the loudest participants are heard. 

Create a space where different topics or questions are spread on posters/post-its around a room or virtual space. Silently and individually, each participant is encouraged to walk around and visit each question/topic in turn and add ideas to each. By moving around and working individually, this method helps create a more reflective, dynamic ideation session and can also help ensure group-think doesn’t set in! 

Walking Brainstorm   #brainstorming   #idea generation   #remote-friendly   This introvert-friendly brainstorming technique helps groups of any size to generate and build on each other’s ideas in a silent but dynamic setting. As the participants keep moving, the exercise is ideal to kick-off a full day workshop or re-energize the group after lunch.

For those who prefer a more organized approach to idea generation, mind mapping is a great activity for creating ideas quickly and effectively. 

Begin by writing the key topic in the center of a piece of paper or in an online whiteboard. Invite participants to brainstorm related topics and ideas by adding branches to the central idea and create new nodes or elements. As a facilitator, you’ll want to group ideas by color and also amend the thickness of the branches to show the strength of various ideas and concepts. 

When you’re done mind mapping, the result will be a diagram that visually represents your ideas and makes it clear how the various parts interrelate – a great resource for idea development or for future sessions!

Mind map   #idea generation   #concepts   #create   #issue analysis   #design   A mind map is a diagram used to represent a number of ideas or things. Mind maps are methods for analyzing information and relationships.

Brain Netting

The concept of brain netting is to not only take your brainstorming online, but to use online tools and virtual spaces to make the session a truly engaging experience. 

The key is to use an online tool that the group is familiar with, can co-create in easily and which works both synchronously or asynchronously. Using an online whiteboard or shared document for brain netting means participants can contribute in both a live online workshop as well as in their own time. This is a unique benefit of online brainstorming, and it’s one we’d recommend taking advantage of with your team!

We’d especially recommend using an online tool that supports easy commenting, images, videos and links – encourage your group to use whatever assets best communicate their ideas!

Six Thinking Hats

Exploring a problem or idea from multiple perspectives is a great way to generate new ideas and inform your brainstorming process. In this brainstorming activity, start by explaining the six different hats and that at various points, each person will wear the different hats to explore your chosen topic. For example, the green hat is for creative thinking while the white hat is all about information and facts.

Invite the group to start with the blue hat, which is to control the process and then move between hats to explore, define, ideate, identify risk and gather information around a topic in a sequence. By asking the group to all wear the same hat at the same time, you can ensure your brainstorm moves forward while also ensure all perspectives are explored.

The Six Thinking Hats   #creative thinking   #meeting facilitation   #problem solving   #issue resolution   #idea generation   #conflict resolution   The Six Thinking Hats are used by individuals and groups to separate out conflicting styles of thinking. They enable and encourage a group of people to think constructively together in exploring and implementing change, rather than using argument to fight over who is right and who is wrong.

Rapid writing

Different teams and workshops need different approaches to generating fresh ideas. While a carefully structured approach can be effective, using quick-fire brainstorming techniques like Rapid Writing can help create a sense of energy, urgency, and get heaps of ideas out quickly.

For this method of brainstorming, start by setting a timer and encouraging your participants to get as many ideas out as possible within that time limit. Remember that at this stage in the idea generation process, there is no such thing as a bad idea and by quickly ideating without being critical, your group can be creative without prematurely shutting down possible ideas. Be sure to collect all the ideas and share them without judgment at the end, whether you’re brainstorming online or in person!

Lotus Blossom

Some of the most effective techniques are those that encourage free-thinking and rapid ideation while also having some rules that can keep things structured. Lotus Blossom combines these concepts while also creating a great visual representation of your brainstorming activity. 

Lotus Blossom helps facilitate idea generation by working out from a central concept and adding eight additional themes or ideas inspired by the first on sticky notes. Once you have those eight ideas, you then invite participants to take each of those and add another eight and effectively blossom them around the original. By clustering ideas in this way, this ideation method also creates a visual resource you can come back to later and follow the brainstorming process from start to finish.

Lotus blossom   #concepts   #create   #design   #idea generation   The lotus blossom method is a creativity exercise. It is a framework for idea generation, starting from one central theme. Eight conceptual themes grow out from the main theme and each of them are used as central theme to generate 8 more themes. Explore!

Starbursting

Complete freedom without an ideation framework isn’t always the best way to find and develop ideas. Structured techniques like Starbursting can help guide a team through more effective idea generation and ensure all key elements are considered at an early stage.

To begin, create a six-pointed star on a large piece of paper or online whiteboard. At the tip of each point of the star, write down the words Who, What, Why, Where, When and How. Invite the group to brainstorm ideas and questions related to each of these points in turn.

At this stage, the group only needs to brainstorm questions in each of these sections, leaving answers until later, though creating follow-up questions can also be helpful in effectively ideating on your central concept or problem.

When ideating on solutions to problems, it’s very easy to come to the table with underlying assumptions that can affect the course of the idea generation process. You can avoid this potential pitfall by using The 5 Whys to go further and deeper in a very simple, group-friendly manner.

Kick-off by working as a group to create a problem statement that you’ll work on solving. Once you have a concise statement, ask the group why you have this problem and discuss the answer. After working together to form a cohesive answer, ask the group why you have the problem again. By repeating the process, you and your team can dig deeper and find the root cause of the issue and move past the first, most obvious ideas.

The 5 Whys   #hyperisland   #innovation   This simple and powerful method is useful for getting to the core of a problem or challenge. As the title suggests, the group defines a problems, then asks the question “why” five times, often using the resulting explanation as a starting point for creative problem solving.

Creative brainstorming techniques 

All brainstorming is creative. Generating ideas and finding solutions often asks groups and teams to find new ways of looking at things but in this next section, we’ll look at techniques that aim to approach the ideation process from a unique or especially creative starting point.

If you’re finding your typical exercises aren’t yielding results or want to try something new, creative games like those below can create space for innovation. Let’s dig in!

Imagie-ination

Words are often our primary tool when it comes to starting a brainstorm or kicking off an idea generation workshop. While these kinds of techniques are tried and tested, it can also be useful to try something different that can unlock your team’s creativity. 

With Imagie-ination, you’ll use images to help your group generate ideas that go beyond the norm. First, collect an assortment of images for your brainstorm and write down a simple description of the topic you want to generate new ideas around. Have each participant select an image and then come up with as many ideas as they can for how the image relates to the topic. 

After the first round, you’ll then cluster ideas together and find an image and title to best illustrate those clusters. This kind of clustering and titling can help refine the ideas your team has generated and move them towards action – a great outcome for any brainstorming session!

Imagie-ination   #idea generation   #gamestorming   Images have the ability to spark insights and to create new associations and possible connections. That is why pictures help generate new ideas, which is exactly the point of this exercise.

Bad idea brainstorming

Idea generation is at its best when groups are encouraged to add their ideas without being self critical or overthinking. Often, individuals involved in ideation can put pressure on themselves to offer only great ideas and so don’t contribute everything that comes to their minds.

Use this brainstorming technique to help free your group’s creativity and encourage them to come up with the absolute worst ideas they can in relation to a central topic or problem. Like reverse brainstorming, this brainstorming technique is a great way to find alternative routes to more creative ideas. Just be sure to use a swot analysis to figure out what should make it into reality!

Bad Idea Brainstorm   #brainstorming   #creative thinking   #idea generation   Name all the bad ideas to make room for good ones. Coming up with the perfect solution right off the bat can feel paralyzing. So instead of trying to find the right answer, get unstuck by listing all the wrong ones.

Brainstorm questions instead of solutions

Our first instinct when it comes to problem-solving can often be to jump straight to giving answers and finding solutions. Though this can be effective, when it comes to generating creative ideas, a different tact can be more effective. 

With this reverse brainstorming game, challenge participants to offer questions instead of solutions so they can respond to a central concept creatively and from a new angle. If you’re finding your group can become blocked when generating ideas, it might be that your existing questions or frameworks aren’t sufficient. By taking a new ideation approach, you can unblock your team!

Brainstorm questions instead of solutions   #questions and answers   #brainstorming   When we are given a problem our reflex is to find answers. But it can be difficult to leave the comfort zone and to come up with creative answers. This exercise will encourage to think out of the box.

Stakeholder Round Robin Brainstorm

Bringing together groups of different stakeholders with their own areas of expertise is a great idea whether you’re brainstorming or finding solutions. That said, it’s worth noting that in these kinds of mixed groups, participants will be coming from different places and have different priorities and approaches to idea generation. 

Start by creating a flipchart or whiteboard space for each stakeholder’s perspective and writing this at the top. Give each stakeholder two minutes to brainstorm on the central idea from their perspective and add those to their flipchart before then inviting each participant to move to the next one and brainstorm from this different perspective. By using this round-robin brainstorming exercise, you can help the group understand the perspectives and insights each member brings to the table while also generating fresh ideas as a result!  

Backcasting

A simple change in perspective can have a massive impact on how your team approaches solving a problem. Backcasting is a simple but effective brainstorming exercise where a team is invited to work backwards from an ideal future state in order to come up with concrete actions they can take today.

Start by listing your long term goals in a time frame of 1-20 years. Then work backwards from that state to today, listing every action necessary to achieve that goal state. Collect insights on what difficulties might come up, what steps your team needs to take and what resources you might need in order to brainstorm effectively and find a new way to reach your team’s long term goals!

Backcasting   #define intentions   #create   #design   #action   Backcasting is a method for planning the actions necessary to reach desired future goals. This method is often applied in a workshop format with stakeholders participating. To be used when a future goal (even if it is vague) has been identified.

Walking Questions

A brainstorming technique with a What if learning style, Walking Questions is a great way of encouraging group members to share knowledge, ask questions to personal problems, and explore a topic dynamically. 

Best used at the end of a training session or workshop, each participant writes a question they have on the top of a sheet of paper then hands it to the person to their right. The person receiving the paper then writes any ideas or answers they have underneath and passes it to the next person.

By the end, the original piece of paper will be returned to the owner filled with ideas and answers from the entire group. It’s a great way of generating ideas from a group quickly and efficiently and of utilizing everyone’s expertise in a structured way. Give it a go! 

Walking questions   #what if learning style   #idea generation   #learning   This is a great facilitation technique to answer open questions of trainees with a “What if” learning style. It prevents the facilitator from answering all questions herself. With this method trainees can:  close knowledge gaps find solutions for personal problems imagine themselves using their new knowledge in future and prepare themselves for obstacles

Guided Imagery

Coming up with new ideas doesn’t always have to be boisterous! You can also get the creative juices flowing in a relaxed way by tapping into mindfulness and imagination with this method.

Start by inviting participants to close their eyes and get comfortable. Next, progress through a guided meditation designed to inspire creativity. Afterward, ask your group to reflect on what came up for them in the meditation and use this as the basis for further brainstorming!

Guided Imagery   #idea generation   #creativity   #online facilitation   #reflection   This can be used for idea generation especially when the group is stuck.

Headlines from the future

Starting from the desired outcome and working backward with a reverse brainstorming technique can be a great way to solve a problem. Thinking into the future can also be inspiring in a way that encourages free thinking and big ideas – a great result for any brainstorming workshop.

In this idea generation game, ask your group to imagine it’s twenty years in the future and that your project or organisation has been a huge success. Invite each participant to draft a headline and sketch an image for a New York Times feature of this reality. Encourage big, bold ideas and debrief by discussing any common themes or ideas before moving onto idea development as a team! 

Headlines from the Future   #creative thinking   #design   #idea generation   #creativity   Get inspired today by a world 20 years away. Sometimes it helps to start from the end. This exercise will help you align with your team on an audacious vision for your project – one that you can work backward from.

Brainstorming techniques for problem solving and refining ideas

When you want to go beyond initial brainstorming and generate more refined ideas, the following complex idea generation techniques can effectively guide you through the process.

These activities combine brainstorming with idea evaluation, idea selection, and then going into concept development to help you come up with the best options. Let’s dig in! 

25/10 Crowd Sourcing

Group ideation can be tricky to manage, and not all techniques are up to the task of managing creative input from large groups effectively. 25/10 Crowd Sourcing is a fantastic exercise that not only invites big, bold ideas, but can ensure everyone takes part in generating ideas as a group.

After first inviting participants to write a big, bold idea on an index card, start a timer and invite the group to move around the space and exchange cards without reading. Stop the timer and ask each person to read the idea and give it a score from 1 to 5. Repeat five times so that each idea has a score out of twenty-five and then find and share the top ten ideas with the group.

Group brainstorming techniques with a mix of blind scoring and sharing can be especially useful in avoiding bias and encouraging bold ideas – especially useful when ideating in large groups!

25/10 Crowd Sourcing   #idea generation   #liberating structures     You can help a large crowd generate and sort their bold ideas for action in 30 minutes or less! With 25/10 Crowd Sourcing , you can spread innovations “out and up” as everyone notices the patterns in what emerges. Though it is fun, fast, and casual, it is a serious and valid way to generate an uncensored set of bold ideas and then to tap the wisdom of the whole group to identify the top ten. Surprises are frequent!

3-12-3 Brainstorm

Brainstorming is often associated with fast ideation and energetic idea generation sessions. While many standard techniques can be slowed down and run in different ways, there can be obvious benefits to maintaining energy and proving the value of short working bursts to your ideation group. 

The 3-12-3 Brainstorm technique taps into the power of speed to generate great ideas and can help a team generate, develop, and present ideas in just less than twenty minutes. By combining speed and structure, this ideation method can help a group pressed for time use the session effectively, and we love how much ground can be covered by a group with this exercise!

3-12-3 Brainstorm   #gamestorming   #idea generation   This format for brainstorming compresses the essentials of an ideation session into one short format. The numbers 3-12-3 refer to the amount of time in minutes given to each of three activities: 3 minutes for generating a pool of observations, 12 for combining those observations into rough concepts, and 3 again for presenting the concepts back to a group.

Mash-Up Innovation

Some of the best ideas come from taking existing ideas and putting them together. Brainstorming that takes advantage of what your group already knows and loves can really supercharge the idea generation process and this creative exercise is a perfect example of that.

In Mash-Up innovation, first ask your group to brainstorm around three different topics or areas and add them to a shared space or whiteboard. Next, organize your participants into small groups who will spend the next twelve minutes combining and mashing up as many of the elements as possible to make even better ideas. After a short idea presentation, you can even take your group through an idea development stage to really make the most out of this activity. You’ll be surprised at what comes out!

Mash-Up Innovation   #hyperisland   #innovation   #idea generation   Mash-ups is a collaborative idea generation method in which participants come up with innovative concepts by combining different elements together. In a first step, participants brainstorm around different areas, such as technologies, human needs, and existing services. In a second step, they rapidly combine elements from those areas to create new, fun and innovative concepts. Mash-ups demonstrates how fast and easy it can be to come up with innovative ideas.

Large group brainstorming can be dynamic, exciting, and productive but without structure and strong facilitation, it can also become disorganized and frustrating. 1-2-4-All is a classic idea generation process that not only helps ideas find space to allow idea development but also ensures the entire group can contribute to the session. 

Start by inviting silent self-reflection on a shared challenge or question before then moving to pairs, foursomes, and then entire group ideation. One of the many benefits of this brainstorming technique is that everyone gets a chance to contribute freely and share their ideas in a structured way. In groups where conversation can become dominated by strong personalities or not everyone gets a chance to speak, this method is well worth employing. 

1-2-4-All   #idea generation   #liberating structures   #issue analysis   With this facilitation technique you can immediately include everyone regardless of how large the group is. You can generate better ideas and more of them faster than ever before. You can tap the know-how and imagination that is distributed widely in places not known in advance. Open, generative conversation unfolds. Ideas and solutions are sifted in rapid fashion. Most importantly, participants own the ideas, so follow-up and implementation is simplified. No buy-in strategies needed! Simple and elegant!

One will get you Ten

Ideas most often spring from other ideas, and the sharing and co-creation of ideas during a brainstorm or idea generation workshop is where the magic really happens. This technique uses the sharing of ideas between teams as a central concept and it’s a great way of having participants communicate and learn from one another’s ideas meaningfully. 

After first generating ideas solo and as a team, this ideation game asks team members to pair up with members of another team and share ideas. Each member then returns to their own team and presents two ideas – one of their own, and one from the other team – while the rest of the team guesses whose is whose. It’s interesting to see how participants package and present generated ideas and find ways to improve them organically as part of a rapid ideation.  

One will get you Ten   #thiagi   #idea generation   #team   If I give you a dollar and you give me a dollar, we both end up where we began. But if I give you an idea and you give me an idea, we end up with two ideas each, benefiting from a 100 percent return on our investment. In One Will Get You Ten, we leverage this principle so that you and all other participants receive a 1000 percent return on your investment on ideas.

The Creativity Dice

When approaching the idea generation process it can be tempting for a team to go with what’s worked in the past and get locked into what appears to be working. Games that challenge the status quo and challenge teams in ways they don’t expect can be especially effective when generating ideas. 

The Creative Dice is a brainstorming technique that encourages participants to work in three minute bursts and work on either specification, investigation, ideation, incubation, Iteration or integration based on a roll of the dice. By moving between different modes, this method prevents premature closure of one line of ideation and keeps the session energized and engaging. What’s more, the non-linear thinking can help with idea development too!

The Creativity Dice   #creativity   #problem solving   #thiagi   #issue analysis   Too much linear thinking is hazardous to creative problem solving. To be creative, you should approach the problem (or the opportunity) from different points of view. You should leave a thought hanging in mid-air and move to another. This skipping around prevents premature closure and lets your brain incubate one line of thought while you consciously pursue another.

Affinity Map

Using brainstorming techniques to get a large number of ideas together quickly and efficiently is a great first step to developing new solutions or solving problems. But what to do once you’ve generated lots of ideas and want to work on idea development? Affinity Map is a great method for organizing your group’s brainstormed ideas and for both seeing and challenging existing patterns.

Starting with a simple brainstorm, Affinity Map asks that the group collectively organizes the ideas into columns or groups based on relationships. By doing this idea clustering as a group, your team can take ownership of the idea generation process and discover patterns of thinking together! It’s a great way of identifying and improving a group’s natural inclinations while also creating meaningful ideas.

Affinity Map   #idea generation   #gamestorming   Most of us are familiar with brainstorming—a method by which a group generates as many ideas around a topic as possible in a limited amount of time. Brainstorming works to get a high quantity of information on the table. But it begs the follow-up question of how to gather meaning from all the data. Using a simple Affinity Diagram technique can help us discover embedded patterns (and sometimes break old patterns) of thinking by sorting and clustering language-based information into relationships. It can also give us a sense of where most people’s thinking is focused

Fun brainstorming games

Brainstorming is often a fast-paced and engaging process that results in a group having fun. Creative brainstorming games that help participants have fun while generating ideas are also effective ways of loosening folks up and getting into new ways of thinking. If you’re finding your group stuck

In this section, we’ll look at brainstorming games that intentionally take a fun angle as a means to create better ideas.

Energy, fun, and creativity go hand-in-hand, and brainstorming techniques that encourage these items and generate ideas quickly and effectively – especially with large groups!

In MindSpin, teams of 3-5 participants are challenged to write as many ideas as they can in two five-minute rounds. Whenever a person writes an idea, they slam it down on the table. If they cannot think of one, they can take an idea from the person on their left and hopefully be inspired to write an additional card they also slam on the table. Remember that this brainstorming game is designed to be fast and loud while getting creative juices flowing. Encourage all participants to really slam their ideas down and keep things moving!

MindSpin   #teampedia   #idea generation   #problem solving   #action   A fast and loud method to enhance brainstorming within a team. Since this activity has more than round ideas that are repetitive can be ruled out leaving more creative and innovative answers to the challenge.

Figure storming

One potential difficulty when generating ideas is that not everyone feels comfortable sharing or holds back their ideas for fear of judgment. Creative brainstorming is all about removing restrictions or hesitation, and enabling your group to ideate freely – figure storming is a great method for achieving this!

Start by asking the group how a famous person, fictional character or well-known creative would approach the problem or topic at hand. You might ask how Albert Einstein, Elizabeth Bennett or Barack Obama might think about the ideas or concepts at hand. By inhabiting a different person’s perspective, not only can teams and individuals access new ideas, but they can also do so free of judgment. Also, it can be great fun to invite Atilla the Hun or Cleopatra to your creative exercises!

Flip and Rip

Images can often unlock our creativity but when using them to generate ideas, it can sometimes be difficult to know where to start. This visual brainstorming technique places some rules on how a group will both source and use images, and can encourage some really creative ideas!

Start by giving participants two magazines or image sets each. Then, invite each person to tear our whatever images stand out to them or grab their attention. Next, give them a problem statement and encourage them to find the connections between the problem and their chosen images. These unexpected connections between visuals can then be used as the foundation for further ideas! Plus, who doesn’t love the sound and feeling of tearing paper!

Flip and Rip   #idea generation   #problem solving   #creativity   #online   Creativity through pictures and images

Forced Connections

An important part of the ideation process is giving your team permission to be silly and bring ideas to the table without fear of judgement or inhibitions. Empowering your team to be creative without limiting themselves can massively affect the effectiveness of your brainstorming and so it’s worth spending time to unblock your participants early.

Assemble a collection of random objects or images and invite participants to choose two or more items and brainstorm how they might be used together or connected in some way. Encourage out-of-the-box thinking and unusual ideas by bringing a collection of odd items to the table and you’ll be surprised at all the ideas your team can generate!

The Thing from the Future

Science fiction and speculative thinking about the future has long been a great source of ideas. In this brainstorming exercise, invite groups to co-design their ideal future by creating tangible objects with their imaginations.

Begin by sourcing a heap of prototyping materials and craft supplies. Invite participants to imagine an ideal future state and create an object that has time travelled back to the present. After spending some time creating strange and wonderful objects, participants then present them to the group and tell stories about the objects to inform future strategies and ideas.

If you’re looking for a fun, practical exercise to bring to your brainstorming session and encourage creative thinking, this activity is a great choice!

The Thing from the Future   #imagination   #storymaking   #idea generation   #issue analysis   Help a group to time-travel and tap their imagination by fictional objects. With tangible objects and the stories your participants make up w/ them you’ll get so much richer inputs and context to inform joint visioning / strategizing: The future doesn’t look that far away when you can pick it off the shelf.

Making Lemonade

Sometimes, the best ideas come from moments of adversity or struggle. This brainstorming exercises leverages the power of positive thinking and attempting to make the best of a bad situation to generate creative ideas.

Start by sharing a couple of negative scenarios that might radically change something in the world. For example, everyone in the world has a cold, it rains constantly or we lost all our customers over night.

Next, ask your group to take something that appears negative and aim to reframe it to be as positive as possible while coming up with ideas of how that change might actually have a positive impact. Rain every day? That might be the end of drought and a boom to umbrella sales!

Making Lemonade   #creative thinking   #creativity   #design   #idea generation   Try on a relentlessly positive, can-do attitude before tackling the big stuff. The proverb goes “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Practice the art of positive thinking to unlock creative ideas. Use this as a warm-up before brainstorming or to energize your team meetings.

Visual brainstorming techniques

Visual brainstorming is a great way of helping your teams out of creative roadblocks and encouraging fresh ideas. When words fail, images can enliven, invigorate and inspire your process. In this section, we’ll look at some great brainstorming techniques that focus on drawing or creating visual responses when ideating. Let’s take a look! 

Brainstorming shouldn’t stop when you have your first good idea. Fast iteration and refinement can help your group discover better ideas and develop ideas in record time. With 6-8-5, you can encourage your team to move from brainstorming to idea development in just a few minutes, and by asking participants to draw, you can keep things flowing easily!

Start by inviting your group to sketch 6-8 ideas in response to a central question or topic in five minutes. Encourage your team to be rough and not to worry about finesse at this stage – remember that the first stage of brainstorming works best when it’s free and unrestricted!

After a quick round of presenting ideas, go through the sketching process again and encourage idea development or ideas that have come out of group sharing. The result will be a heap of ideas and sketches you can move forward with too! 

6-8-5   #gamestorming   #idea generation   Part of the reason we end up with under-developed ideas is that we stick with the first good idea we have — rather than taking the time to explore complementary approaches. 6-8-5 is designed to combat this pattern by forcing us to generate lots of ideas in a short period of time. The activity can then be repeated to hone & flesh out a few of the best ideas.

Four Step Sketch

Visual brainstorming techniques can be great right at the start of the process but they can be equally effective later on when it comes to idea development. In this exercise pulled from the design sprint playbook, take your group through a structured ideation process that encourages reflection, quick sketching and a completed idea too.

Begin by reviewing any existing materials or outputs from earlier exercises before then having your group do a round of Crazy 8’s, where they create eight sketched variations on their idea. At this stage, you then invite participants to finesse their idea and create a final polished sketch to share with the team. By mixing reflection, ideation and development, this brainstorming technique offers a structured path towards better ideas!

Four-Step Sketch   #design sprint   #innovation   #idea generation   #remote-friendly   The four-step sketch is an exercise that helps people to create well-formed concepts through a structured process that includes: Review key information Start design work on paper,  Consider multiple variations , Create a detailed solution . This exercise is preceded by a set of other activities allowing the group to clarify the challenge they want to solve. See how the Four Step Sketch exercise fits into a Design Sprint

Drawing Together

Visual thinking is a powerful tool for any creative process or brainstorming workshop. This brainstorming game asks teams to tell stories about a personal or group challenge personal by expressing themselves with just five simple symbols drawn on paper. After a first draft, participants are then invited to refine their stories with colour, size and placement before the group interprets them.

By expressing themselves in a novel way, participants can exercise their creative muscles and consider new ways to express ideas nonverbally.

Drawing Together   #skills   #liberating structures   #visual methods   You can help people access hidden knowledge such as feelings, attitudes, and patterns that are difficult to express with words. When people are tired, their brains are full, and they have reached the limits of logical thinking, you can help them evoke ideas that lie outside logical, step-by-step understanding of what is possible. Stories about individual or group transformations can be told with five easy-to-draw symbols that have universal meanings. The playful spirit of drawing together signals that more is possible and many new answers are expected. Drawing Together cuts through the culture of overreliance on what people say and write that constrains the emergence of novelty. It also provides a new avenue of expression for some people whose ideas would otherwise not surface.

Brainstorming games for warming up

Generating ideas and thinking creatively isn’t always easy. Finding ways to energize and prepare your group for brainstorming with simple and fun warm-ups can help ensure the success of the workshop or session and introduce key idea generation concepts too.

While these creative games don’t necessarily create ideas in themselves, they are a great way to get teams ready for the next step. Let’s take a look!

When it comes to warming people up for an idea generation workshop, simple is best. With Draw Toast, you can introduce your group to visual thinking, working memory and systems thinking, all through the prism of a simple warm-up that works well online or offline!

For this creative exercise, invite your participants to illustrate how to make toast with a sketch or diagram without using any text. Afterward, share observations and insights as a group and outline the fact that there is no right or wrong diagram, and that differing and unique approaches to a problem or concept are all valid and useful. Not only is this a fun, fast brainstorming technique, but it prepares a group for the next stages of idea generation too!

Draw toast   #problem solving   #opening   #design   #gamestorming   #idea generation   You can use the Draw Toast exercise to introduce people to the concepts of visual thinking, working memory, mental models and/or systems thinking. This also works as a nice warm-up exercise to get people engaged with each other and thinking visually. Plus, it’s fun!

The Paper Clip Method

Even established and successful groups have preconceptions about brainstorming or how to generate ideas. Warming up a team by introducing the power of brainstorming practically can prevent stumbling blocks later on and ensure everyone is on the same page when approaching the brainstorming process.

The Paper Clip Method is a creative exercise that challenges your group to brainstorm all possible uses for a paper clip. After some silent brainstorming, debrief by sharing what the group has come up with and highlight how the group has cumulatively come up with a greater quality and quantity of ideas than any single person could.

The paper clip method   #sharing   #creativity   #warm up   #idea generation   #brainstorming   The power of brainstorming. A training for project leaders, creativity training, and to catalyse getting new solutions.

Apple-Drawing Ideation

Learning how to approach creative brainstorming as a group is a worthwhile way to kick-off your idea generation workshop. In this simple creative game, split your participants into groups and invite them to take it in turns to fill a grid with drawings of apples, with the challenge that no apple can be the same as another. 

When the time is done or the grid is full, debrief and highlight some of key concepts for effective brainstorming including the fact quantity is a precursor to quality and that we should try to build on the ideas of others. This brainstorming game is flexible by design  and you can use it with something other than apples for a more practical application: e.g., draw 30 logos, write 30 taglines, draw 30 new cars.

Apple-Drawing Ideation   #hyperisland   #innovation   #idea generation   The purpose of this simple exercise is to demonstrate three key principles useful for creativity and idea generation: quantity is a condition for quality; building on the ideas of others; the ideas we come up with are usually all the same. The format is simple, with small groups standing and drawing apples. At the end of the exercise, the whole group reflects and draws out learnings and reflections.

Activities to support a brainstorming workshop

We’ve covered everything from fast and fun creative games to in-depth brainstorming techniques, but what about if you’re looking for ways to improve or kick start your brainstorming process? Preparing for a brainstorming workshop with research on inspiration collection can really help your team make the most of the upcoming session.

In this section, we’ll look at some techniques and methods you can use to inform, enable and improve your group brainstorm and bring better quality ideas to the table! 

Rapid Research

Like all effective workshops, idea generation sessions generally want to limit the number of participants in the room to ensure productivity. That said, ideas and insight can come from anywhere in an organisation and this brainstorming technique can tap into the expertise of people outside of the room.

Start by asking participants to think of a colleague or peer outside the room and call them to get a perspective on the topic or question at hand. For remote teams, you can arrange quick calls or use Slack or other tools to get quick and useful feedback. After collecting input, bring the group back together to share and document insights. You’ll be surprised at how quickly and effectively you can get a wide variety of useful information!

Rapid Research   #hyperisland   #innovation   #idea generation   A simple exercise that complements exploratory, discursive, and creative workshops with insights and opinions from outside. Use this exercise when brainstorming ideas, developing a new product or service or creating a strategy or plan that will include others. Participants phone a co-worker and ask them questions relevant to the task. This quickly generates meaningful input from a range of “outside” perspectives. Often, participants will be surprised at how simple it was to solicit this input and how valuable it is to the process.

Lightning Demos

No idea is wholly original. Brainstorming is all about taking existing ideas and learning from others while also bringing our own insights to the table.

With this activity, you and your group will look for inspiration from how other organizations, products or thought leaders have solved or approached the problem or topic at hand. Invite participants to spend a little time gathering 2-3 examples before then presenting ideas back to the group. By the end of the exercise, you’ll have a set of ideas you can use as the basis for further discussion or idea development.

If you’re working online, collect demos in an online whiteboard and even explore the possibility of gathering inspiration before the workshop if your team has a busy schedule.

Lightning Demos   #design sprint   #innovation   #idea generation   This is an exercise to inspire your team with products or services that they think they can use as inspiration for their concepts in the next phases of their design sprints.

The Medici Effect

Great ideas can often come from sources outside of your own industry or field. The Medici Effect is inspired by Frans Johansson’s book The Medici Effect, which explores how game-changing ideas and breakthroughs can occur when concepts and ideas from one area are applied to another and used as the basis for innovation.

In this exercise, invite participants to find examples of how individuals from other fields have achieved their goals and come up with great ideas. Think of successful scientists, creatives, business owners, musicians, entrepreneurs, educators etc. have found success and what inspiration you and your team might take from them. If working online, encourage participants to include images, links and quotes so you can create an inspiration wall for further exploration of the problem you are trying to solve!

Brainstorming session templates

Are you looking to run a workshop or meeting where you need a complete group process to come up with ideas and turn those into actions? 

Check out the brainstorming session templates below to see how to build upon an initial brainstorming session with appropriate idea selection and prioritization tools to arrive at sound group decisions.!

Ideation Workshop

In this one-day workshop template, follow an entire ideation process from start to finish, going from brainstorming and idea generation through to idea development and pitching. Tap into concepts such as disruptive cases, future tech & trends and opposite thinking to create innovative ideas and empower your team!

One Hour Brain Sprint

Have imited time for group brainstorming? Try the One Hour Brain Sprint to generate ideas quickly and effectively, all while avoiding unproductive discussions and the pitfalls of some brainstorming approaches.

One-hour Brain Sprint

Remote Problem Solving Workshop

Want to solve problems with your remote team? This virtual workshop template includes several stages of ideation and development and provides a great example of how you might utilize lightning demos and research as a basis for experimental ideas and solutions.

Remote problem solving workshop

What are the benefits of group brainstorming ?

While the primary measure of success for a brainstorming workshop will be the quantity and quality of ideas generated, the benefits of this kind of session can go much further.

Establishing an ideation mindset and encouraging creative thinking will benefit your organization in the long term, and finding new ways to push your team in the direction of generating effective ideas has positive effects for your whole organization. Let’s see some of the benefits that can come from bringing team members together for a brainstorming session.

Encourage creativity 

Creative games and exercises can yield instant results when it comes to creatively engaging a team and generating ideas but beyond that, regular brainstorming can help participants be more creative in their regular work and find methods of finding new ideas and solutions that work for them. Being creative is a wonderful way to engage a group and getting out of a regular workflow can be the key that unlocks innovation.

Inclusive, easy-to-understand activities

Brainstorming is a simple group activity that is easy to understand and contribute to. Whatever skill level or competency a person has, the first stage of the idea generation process is something that can be involved in with little overhead or difficulty. This can have massive value in helping a team come together toward a shared goal in an inclusive and simple way!

Diverse ideas

Relying on certain teams or individuals to generate ideas alone can lead to stagnation. By pooling together a diverse group of people to contribute to generating and developing ideas, brainstorming can be a great way to find innovative approaches and diverse ways of thinking. Every point of view you bring to the table is another way of approaching the issue and the results generated by diverse groups are often more robust and multi-facted than those made in a silo.

Quantity of ideas

When it comes to brainstorming techniques, quantity often comes before quality. In order to find great ideas, a group first needs to flush out as many ideas as possible and share before moving onto idea development. The best brainstorming exercises encourage the creation of large amounts of ideas in a short period of time, providing a great foundation for the next steps! 

Get past creative blocks

Problem solving or idea generation can go around in circles if a team isn’t given the freedom to think creatively and approach things from a new angle. Brainstorming methods like those featured here are great ways to unblock a team’s creative and find new ways to approach stalled conversations.

Improve team morale

Brainstorm sessions are often fun and energetic by their nature, and games and exercises that focus on idea generation allow for everyone to contribute and feel heard as part of their team. These kinds of idea generation activities can really help bring a team together and improve team morale too – everyone wants to take part in developing new ideas and being creative!

Get project buy-in

Involving participants across departments and specialties early in the process by inviting them to contribute to generating and developing ideas can not only lead to great ideas but also ensure that a project is followed through on. Get buy-in early by involving stakeholders in early brainstorming sessions and help that creative energy continue throughout your project!

Kickstart projects with energy

The opening stages of a project can determine the tone for the rest of it, and by kicking off your projects with a fun, energetic brainstorming workshop, you can ensure everyone is energised for the work ahead. Try creative games to help your team approach the project with a sense of creativity and experimentation and use brainstorming techniques that see proven results to help move a team forward effectively.

Brainstorming sessions made simple

An effective brainstorming session means creating a balanced agenda of activities and group discussions while keeping everyone engaged.

With SessionLab, you  drag, drop and reorder blocks  to build your step-by-step agenda.

Your session  timing   adjusts automatically  as you make changes and when you’re done, you can  share a beautiful printout  with your colleagues and participants.

Explore  how facilitators use SessionLab  to design effective workshops that create results or  watch this five minute video  to see the planner in action!

Over to you

Brainstorming can be simple or complex, visual or virtual, but whatever method you choose to use, the results should be the same – great ideas. Finding new ways to facilitate innovation is something we’re passionate about here at SessionLab, and we hope you find the above brainstorming techniques useful! 

Did we miss anything? Are there any great brainstorming or idea generation methods you’d like to add? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

James Smart is Head of Content at SessionLab. He’s also a creative facilitator who has run workshops and designed courses for establishments like the National Centre for Writing, UK. He especially enjoys working with young people and empowering others in their creative practice.

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43 Creative writing exercises

A selection of fun creative writing exercises that can be completed solo, or with a group. Some are prompts to help inspire you to come up with story ideas, others focus on learning specific writing skills.

I run a  Creative Writing Meetup  for adults and teens in Montpellier or online every week. We start with a 5 to 20 minute exercise, followed by an hour and a half of silent writing, during which each participant focuses on their own project. Every exercise listed below has been run with the group and had any kinks ironed out.  Where the exercises specify a number of people, if you have a larger group, simply split everyone up into smaller groups as appropriate.

The solo exercises are ideal to help stimulate your mind before working on a larger project, to overcome writer’s block, or as stand-alone prompts in their own right. If a solo exercise inspires you and you wish to use it with a larger group, give every member ten minutes to complete the exercise, then ask anyone who wishes to share their work to do so in groups of 3 or 4 afterwards.

Looking for something quick to fire your imagination? Check out these  creative writing prompts for adults .

Writing Retreat in South France

A note on running exercises remotely

While you can enjoy the exercises solo, they are also designed for online writing groups using Zoom, WhatsApp, or Discord.

If you're running a group and follow a ' Shut Up and Write ' structure, I recommend connecting on WhatsApp (for example) first, doing the exercise together, sharing writing samples as needed. Next, write in silence for an hour and a half on your own projects, before reconnecting for a brief informal chat at the end. This works great with small remote groups and is a way to learn new techniques, gain online support, and have a productive session.

If you have a larger online group, it's worth looking into Zoom, as this has a feature called  Breakout Rooms . Breakout Rooms let you split different writers into separate rooms, which is great for group activities. The free version of Zoom has a 40 minute limit, which can be restrictive, but Zoom Pro is well worth it if you're going to use it on a regular basis. In my experience, Zoom has a better connection than Facebook chat or WhatsApp.

A Letter From Your Character To You

Spend ten minutes writing a letter from a character in your novel to  you , the author, explaining why you should write about them. This serves three purposes:

• As you write, it helps you get into the mindset of the character. Ask yourself how they would language this letter and what they would consider important.
• It's motivating to know that your character wants you to write about them.
• If your goal is to publish a complete work of fiction one day, whether it be a novel, a play or a movie script, you will want to contact an agent or publisher. This helps you practice in an easy, safe way.

If you're doing this exercise with a group of teens or adults, and some of the group haven't already started working on their masterpiece, they can instead choose any fictional novel they love. Ask participants to imagine that a character within the book wrote to the author in the first place to ask them to write their story. How did they plead their case?

The Opening Sentence

The opening sentence has to grab the reader's attention and make them want to keep reading. Many authors achieve this by starting with an action scene. In modern literature, it's best to avoid starting with someone waking up, or a description of the weather. In this exercise the task is to write an opening sentence either to a book you're currently writing, or simply for an imaginary piece of literature.  Here are some of my favourite opening sentences to get you going:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

George Orwell , 1984

The Golem's life began in the hold of a steamship.

Helene Wecker , The Golem and the Djinni

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

It wasn't a very likely place for disappearances, at least at first glance.

Diana Gabaldon , Outlander

You better not never tell nobody but God.

Alice Walker , The Color Purple

The cage was finished.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez ,  Balthazar’s Marvelous Afternoon

Imagine that you are living your life out of order: Lunch before breakfast, marriage before your first kiss.

Audrey Niffenegger ,  The Time Traveler's Wife

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Douglas Adams ,  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

There are a plethora of ways you can start a book, however two ways that help engage the reader immediately are:

• Set the scene in as few words as possible, so the reader immediately knows what's happening and wants to know what happens next.  The scene must be original and create a vivid image in the reader's mind.
• Surprise the reader with an unusual event or usual point of view.

Spend 5 minutes working on your own opening sentence, then share it with the other participants.

Make your protagonist act!

Exercise for 2 writers, or can be done solo.

According to John Gardner:

"Failure to recognise that the central character must act, not simply be acted upon, is the single most common mistake in the fiction of beginners."

Spend 5 minutes writing a scene where the protagonist is passive in a conversation with one other character. It could be that the other character says something dramatic, and the protagonist just listens, or it could be anything else of your choice!

Once the 5 minutes is up, swap papers with another writer. If you're using Zoom, or working online, send it to each other in a private chat. Now the other person spends 8 minutes rewriting the scene to make the protagonist as active as possible. This might include:

Read both scenes together. Which makes you want to keep on reading?

If you're doing this as a solo writing exercise, simply complete both parts yourself.

• Showing the emotion this evokes.
• Getting them to disagree with the other character.
• Showing how they respond physically (whether it's as a physical manifestation of how they feel, or a dramatic gesture to make a point).

Overcoming writer's block

Are you staring at a blank page or stuck for any story ideas? This exercise will help anyone who's experiencing writer's block with a particular piece of writing. If this isn't you, that's great, others will value your input!

If anyone has a particular scene they're stuck with (a pool of blood on the floor they have no explanation for, a reason why the rich lady just walked into a particular pub, etc.) then at the start of the exercise everyone briefly describes their scenes (if working online with a large group, typing it into the chat might be best). Everyone then chooses one scene to use as a writing prompt to write a short story for 10-15 minutes.

Afterwards, split into small groups if necessary, and read out how you completed someone else's writing prompt. As everyone listens to everyone else's ideas, this can be a wonderful source of inspiration and also improves your writing. As an alternative solo exercise, try free writing. With free writing, simply write as quickly as you can on the topic without editing or censoring yourself - just let your creative juices flow. If you're not sure what happens next, brainstorm options on the page, jot down story ideas, or just put, "I don't know what happens next." Keep going and ideas will come.

Writing Character Arcs

There are several different types of character arc in a novel, the 3 most common being:

For this exercise choose either a positive or negative character arc. Spend 8 minutes writing a scene from the start of a novel, then 8 minutes writing a scene towards the end of a novel showing how the character has developed between the two points. Don't worry about including how the character has changed, you can leave that to the imagination.

The point here is to capture the essence of a character, as they will be the same, but show their development.

• Positive  - Where a character develops and grows during the novel. Perhaps they start unhappy or weak and end happy or powerful.
• Negative  - Where a character gets worse during a novel. Perhaps they become ill or give in to evil tendencies as the novel progresses.
• Flat  - In a flat character arc the character themself doesn't change much, however the world around them does. This could be overthrowing a great injustice, for example.

Sewing Seeds in Your Writing

In this exercise, we will look at how to sew seeds. No, not in your garden, but in your story. Seeds are the tiny hints and indicators that something is going on, which influence a reader's perceptions on an often unconscious level. They're important, as if you spring a surprise twist on your readers without any warning, it can seem unbelievable. Sew seeds that lead up to the event, so the twists and turns are still surprising, but make intuitive sense. Groups : Brainstorm major plot twists that might happen towards the end of the novel and share it in a Zoom chat, or on pieces of paper. Choose one twist each. Individuals : Choose one of the following plot twists:   -  Your friend is actually the secret son of the king.   -  Unreliable narrator - the narrator turns out to be villain.   -  The monster turns out to be the missing woman the narrator is seeking.   -  The man she is about to marry happens to already have a wife and three kids.

Write for ten minutes and give subtle hints as to what the plot twist is. This is an exercise in subtlety. Remember, when the twist occurs, it should still come as a surprise.

This is a fun writing activity for a small group. You’ve found a magic potion labelled ‘Cat Chat’ and when you drink it, you turn into whichever animal you’re thinking about; but there’s a problem, it also picks up on the brainwaves of other people near you!

Everyone writes down an animal in secret and then reveals it to the other writers.  The spell will turn you into a creature that combines elements of all the animals.  Each person then spends 5 minutes writing down what happens when they drink the potion.

After the 5 minutes is up, everyone shares their story with the other participants.

If you enjoy this exercise, then you may also want to check out our  Fantasy and Sci-Fi writing prompts  full of world building, magic, and character development prompts..

Joe Brainard wrote a novel called:  I Remember It contains a collection of paragraphs all starting with “I remember”.  This is the inspiration for this exercise, and if you’re stuck for what to write, is a great way to get the mental gears turning.  Simply write “I remember” and continue with the first thing that pops into your head.

Spend 5 minutes writing a short collection of “I remember” stories.

Here are a couple of examples from Joe Brainard’s novel:

“I remember not understanding why people on the other side of the world didn't fall off.”

“I remember waking up somewhere once and there was a horse staring me in the face.”

Giving feedback to authors

If you're running a workshop for more experienced adult authors and have at least an hour, this is a good one to use. This is the longest exercise on this page, but I felt it important enough to include.

Give each author the option to bring a piece of their own work. This should be double spaced and a maximum of 3 pages long. If you're running a workshop where not everyone is likely to bring a manuscript, ask everyone who wants to bring one to print two copies each. If someone forgets but has a laptop with them, the reader can always use their laptop.

Print out a few copies and hand them around to everyone in the workshop of the guide on: 'How to give constructive feedback to writers'

Each author who brought a sample with them then gives them to one other person to review. They write their name on the manuscript in a certain colour pen, then add any comments to it before passing it to a second person who does the same (commenting on the comments if they agree or disagree).

Then allow 5 minutes for everyone to discuss the feedback they've received, ensuring they are giving constructive feedback.

The Five Senses

Painting by Giovanni Battista Manerius -  The Five Senses

Choose a scene and write it for 5 minutes focusing on one sense, NOT sight. Choose between:

Hearing  Taste Smell Touch

This can be internal as well as external (I heard my heartbeat thudding in my ears, or I smelt my own adrenaline).

After the 5 minutes stop and everyone reads it out loud to each other. Now write for another 5 minutes and continue the other person's story, but do NOT use sight OR the sense they used.

You can use any sense to communicate the essentials, just focus on creating emotions and conveying the story with the specific sense(s).

If you need some writing prompts, here are possible scenes that involve several senses:

• Climbing through an exotic jungle
• Having an argument that becomes a fight
• A cat's morning
• Talking to someone you're attracted to

Show don't tell

2 or 3 people

A lot of writing guides will advise you to, "Show, don't tell". What does this actually mean?

If you want to evoke an emotional reaction from your reader, showing them what is happening is a great way to do so.  You can approach this in several ways:

Split up into pairs and each person writes down a short scene from a story where they "tell" it.  After this, pass the description of the scene to your partner and they then have 5 minutes to rewrite it to "show" what happened.  If there are an odd number of participants, make one group of three, with each person passing their scene clockwise, so everyone has a new scene to show.  After the 5 minutes, for small groups everyone reads their new description to everyone else, or for large groups, each person just reads their new scene to their partner.

• Avoid internal dialogue (thinking), instead have your protagonist interact with other people, or have a physical reaction to something that shows how s/he feels.  Does their heart beat faster?  Do they notice the smell of their own adrenaline?  Do they step backwards, or lean forwards?
• Instead of using an adjective like creepy, e.g. "Mary entered the creepy house", show why the house is creepy through description and in the way the protagonist responds - "The light streamed through the filthy skylight, highlighting the decomposing body of a rat resting on top of it.  As Mary stepped inside, she felt a gust of freezing air brush past her. She turned, but there was nothing there..."

World building

World building is the art of conveying the magic of living in a different world, whether it's a spaceship, a medieval castle, a boat, or simply someone's living room. To master world building, it's not necessary to know every intricate detail, rather to convey the experience of what it would be like to live there.

Choose one of the above images as a prompt and spend 10 minutes writing a scene from the perspective of someone who is seeing it for the first time. Now, move your character six months forward and imagine they've spent the last six months living or working there. Write another scene (perhaps with an additional character) using the image as a background, with the events of the scene as the main action.

Click the above image for a close-up.

Gossiping about a character as if they're a friend.

Judy Blume says that she tells her family about her characters as if they’re real people. 

Chris Claremont said, "For me, writing the 'X-Men' was easy - is easy. I know these people, they're my friends." 

Today’s exercise has 2 parts. First, spend 5 minutes jotting down some facts about a character you’ve invented that might come up if you were telling your friends about them. Either choose a character in something you’ve already written, or invent one from scratch now.

Answer the questions:

What are they up to? How are they? What would you say if you were gossiping about them?

Then split up into groups of 4 to 6 writers. 2 volunteers from each group then role-play talking about their character as if they were a friend (perhaps another character in the story).  The other participants will role-play a group of friends gossiping about the character behind their back and ask questions. If you don’t know the answer, invent it!

Degrees of Emotion Game

This is based on an acting game, to help actors understand how to perform with different degrees of emotion.

Ask everyone to write the following 4 emotions:

For groups of 5 or less, write down numbers starting with 1 and going up until everyone has a number, then give them out in order. For groups of 6 or more, divide groups into 3's, 4's or 5's.

Each person has to write a scene where the protagonist is alone and is only allowed to say a single word, e.g. "Banana".  The writer with number 1 should write the scene with a very low level of the emotion (e.g. happiness), number 2 increases the intensity a bit and the highest number writes a scene with the most intense emotion you can possibly imagine.

Once each writer has written about happiness, rotate the numbers one or two spaces, then move onto anger, then fear, then sadness.

It can help to give everyone numbers showing the intensity of the emotions to write about at the start of the exercise, in which case you may wish to print either the Word or PDF file, then use the ones corresponding to 3, 4 or 5 writers.

Everyone shares their scene with the other course participants.

Three birds, one line

The first paragraph of a surprising number of best-selling novels serves multiple purposes. These are to:

• Establish a goal
• Set the scene
• Develop a character

Nearly every chapter in a novel also serves all three purposes. Instead of establishing a goal though, the protagonist either moves towards it, or encounters an obstacle that hinders them from achieving it.

Some books manage to meet all three purposes with their opening lines, for example:  

Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

J.K. Rowling ,  Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone  

A little more than one hundred days into the fortieth year of her confinement, Dajeil Gelian was visited in her lonely tower overlooking the sea by an avatar of the great ship that was her home.

Iain M. Banks ,  Excession  

"We should start back," Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.

George R.R. Martin ,  A Game of Thrones

For this exercise write a sentence or short paragraph that serves all three purposes. If you're already writing a novel, then see if you can do this for the first line in a chapter. If not, choose any combination from the following table:

Blind Date on Valentine's Day (Exercise for Adults)

In pairs one writer spends a minute or two describing a character they're writing about, or alternatively they can describe a celebrity or someone from a work of fiction.  The next writer then describes their character.

The story is that these 2 characters (or in my case, person and alien, as I'm writing a sci-fi) have accidentally ended up on a blind date with each other. Perhaps the waiter seated them in the wrong location, perhaps it's an actual blind date, or perhaps they met in some other fashion the writers can determine.

Now spend 10 minutes discussing what happens next!

A Success (Works best for online groups)

This exercise works best for online groups, via Zoom, for example.  The instructions to give are:

"In a few words describe a success in your life and what it felt like to achieve it. It can be a small victory or a large one."

Share a personal example of your own (mine was watching my homeschooled sons sing in an opera together).

"Once you have one (small or large), write it in the chat.

The writing exercise is then to choose someone else's victory to write about for 10 minutes, as if it was the end of your own book.

If you want to write for longer, imagine how that book would start. Write the first part of the book with the ending in mind."

This is great for reminding people of a success in their lives, and also helps everyone connect and discover something about each other.

Your dream holiday

You’re going on a dream holiday together, but always disagree with each other. To avoid conflict, rather than discuss what you want to do, you’ve decided that each of you will choose a different aspect of the holiday as follows:

• Choose where you’ll be going – your favourite holiday destination.
• Choose what your main fun activity will be on the holiday.
• Decide what mode of travel you’ll use to get there.
• If there’s a 4 th  person, choose what you’ll eat on the holiday and what you’ll be wearing.

Decide who gets to choose what at random. Each of you then writes down your dream holiday destination/activity/travel/food & clothes in secret.  Next spend 5 minutes discussing your dream holiday and add any other details you’d like to include, particularly if you’re passionate about doing something in real life.

Finally, everyone spends another 5 minutes writing down a description of the holiday, then shares it with the others.

A haiku is a traditional Japanese form of non-rhyming poetry whose short form makes it ideal for a simple writing exercise.

They are traditionally structured in 3 lines, where the first line is 5 syllables, the second line is 7 syllables, and the third line is 5 syllables again. Haiku tend to focus on themes of nature and deep concepts that can be expressed simply.

A couple of examples:

A summer river being crossed how pleasing with sandals in my hands! Yosa Buson , a haiku master poet from the 18 th  Century.

And one of mine:

When night-time arrives Stars come out, breaking the dark You can see the most

Martin Woods

Spend up to 10 minutes writing a haiku.  If you get stuck with the 5-7-5 syllable rule, then don’t worry, the overall concept is more important!

See  How to write a haiku  for more details and examples.

Unlike a haiku, which is profound and sombre, a limerick is a light-hearted, fun rhyming verse.

Here are a couple of examples:

A wonderful bird is the pelican. His bill can hold more than his beli-can He can take in his beak Food enough for a week But I'm damned if I see how the heli-can.

Dixon Lanier Merritt, 1910

There was a young lady named Bright, Whose speed was far faster than light; She started one day In a relative way, And returned on the previous night.

Arthur Henry Reginald Buller in  Punch,  1923

The 1 st , 2 nd  and 5 th  line all rhyme, as do the 3 rd  and 4 th  line.  The overall number of syllables isn’t important, but the 3 rd  and 4 th  lines should be shorter than the others.

Typically, the 1 st  line introduces the character, often with “There was”, or “There once was”. The rest of the verse tells their story.

Spend 10 minutes writing a limerick.

Time Travel - Child, Adult, Senior

Imagine that your future self as an old man/woman travels back in time to meet you, the adult you are today.  Alternatively, you as a child travels forward in time to meet yourself as an adult.  Or perhaps both happen, so the child you, adult you, and senior you are all together at the same time.  In story form write down what happens next.

Participants then share their story with other writers either in small groups, or to the whole group.

Focus on faces

Solo exercise.

One challenge writers face is describing a character. A common mistake is to focus too much on the physical features, e.g. "She had brown eyes, curly brown hair and was five foot six inches tall."

The problem with this is it doesn't reveal anything about the character's personality, or the relationship between your protagonist and the character. Your reader is therefore likely to quickly forget what someone looks like.  When describing characters, it's therefore best to:

• Animate them - it's rare that someone's sitting for a portrait when your protagonist first meets them and whether they're talking or walking, it's likely that they're moving in some way.
• Use metaphors or similes  - comparing physical features to emotionally charged items conjures both an image and a sense of who someone is.
• Involve your protagonist  - if your protagonist is interacting with a character, make it personal.  How does your protagonist view this person?  Incorporate the description as part of the description.
• Only give information your protagonist knows  - they may know if someone is an adult, or a teenager, but they won't know that someone is 37 years old, for example.

Here are three examples of character descriptions that leave no doubt how the protagonist feels.

“If girls could spit venom, it'd be through their eyes.” S.D. Lawendowski,  Snapped

"And Ronan was everything that was left: molten eyes and a smile made for war." Maggie Stiefvater,  The Dream Thieves

"His mouth was such a post office of a mouth that he had a mechanical appearance of smiling." Charles Dickens

Spend 5 minutes writing a character introduction that is animated, uses metaphors or similes and involves your protagonist.

If working with a group, then form small groups of 3 or 4 and share your description with the rest of the group.

Onomatopeai, rhyme and alliteration

Today's session is all about sound.

Several authors recommend reading your writing out loud after you've written it to be sure it sounds natural.   Philip Pullman  even goes as far as to say:

"When I’m writing, I’m more conscious of the sound, actually, than the meaning. I know what the rhythm of the sentence is going to be before I know what the words are going to be in it."

For today's exercise, choose the name of a song and write for 10 minutes as if that's the title for a short story. Focus on how your writing sounds and aim to include at least one onomatopoeia, rhyme or alliteration.  At the end of the 10 minutes, read it out loud to yourself, or to the group.

Alliterations

An alliteration example from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free; We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea.

Onomatopoeias

Buzz, woof, quack, baa, crash, purr, beep, belch,...

The alphabet story - creating a story as a group

This is a novel way to write a story as a group, one word at a time.  The first person starts the story that begins with any word starting with “A”, the next person continues the story with a word starting with “B”, and so on.

Keep going round until you have completed the alphabet.  Ideally it will all be one sentence, but if you get stuck, start a new sentence.  Don’t worry if it doesn’t make complete sense!

It can be tricky to remember the alphabet when under pressure, so you may wish to print it out a couple of times, so the storytellers can see it if they need to, this is particularly helpful if you have dyslexics in the group.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Here’s an example of an alphabet story:

A Band Can Dance Each Friday, Ghostly Hauntings In Jail Kill Lucky Men, Nobody Or Perhaps Quiet Rats, Still That Unifies Villains Who X-Ray Your Zebras.

As I mentioned, it doesn’t need to make sense!

A question or two

Small or large groups

The standard format in our group is a short writing exercise followed by an hour and a half of silent writing on our projects.

At one point I felt like we'd done a lot of small group exercises, and wanted to gain an insight into what everyone was working on, so we did the following exercise instead:

Go round the table and ask everyone to briefly talk about their writing.  Each person then asks one or two yes/no questions.

Everyone responds either by raising their hand for 'yes' or shaking their heads for 'no'. You can also leap up and down to indicate a very strong 'yes'.

Questions can be about anything, and you can use them either to help guide your writing or to help find other people in the group who have similar interests.

Here are some random examples you might ask:

• I want to write a romance novel and am considering setting it in Paris, a traditional romantic setting, or Liverpool which is a less obvious setting. Who thinks Liverpool would be best?
• I need to know more about the life of a farmer. Has anyone got farming experience who I can interview in exchange for a drink?
• My character gets fired and that night goes back to his office and steals 35 computers. Does that sound realistic as the premise of a story?

This works best when you give participants some advance notice, so they have time to think of a question.

Murder Mystery Game

Groups of 3 or 4

This exercise takes 20-30 minutes and allows participants to create a murder mystery outline together.

Phase 1 (3 minutes)

• Split into groups of 3 or 4
• Decide as a group where the murder occurs (e.g. the opera house, a bar, a casino)
• Decide one person who will write the details of the victim and the murder itself.  Everyone else writes the details of one suspect each.
• The ‘victim author’ then invents a few extra details about the scene of the crime, who the victim was (a teenage punk, an adult opera singer, etc.) and the murder weapon and summarises this to the others.

Phase 2 (10 minutes)

Each person then writes a police report as if they are either describing the scene of the crime, or recording the notes from their interview with a single suspect:

Write the following:

• 1 line description of the victim.
• When they were last seen by a group of witnesses (and what they were doing).
• How the murder occurred in more detail based on the evidence available.

Write the following (from the perspective of the investigator):

• 1 line description of the suspect
• What they said during the interview (including what they claim to have doing when the murder occurs).
• A possible motivation (as determined by the police from other witnesses).

Phase 3 (5 minutes)

• Each person reads out their police reports to the other members of their small group
• As a group, decide who the murderer was and what actually happened

See more ideas on  creating murder mystery party games

The obscure movie exercise

Pick a famous movie and spend 5 minutes writing a scene from it from an unusual perspective.  Your aim is to achieve a balance between being too obscure and making it too obvious.  Feel free to add internal dialogue.

At the end of the 5 minutes, everyone reads their movie scene to the others and all the other participants see if they can guess what the movie is.

How to hint at romantic feelings

Write a scene with two people in a group, where you hint that one is romantically interested in the other, but the feelings aren’t reciprocated.

The goal of this exercise is to practice subtlety. Imagine you are setting a scene for the future where the characters feelings will become more important. Choose a situation like a work conference, meeting with a group of friends, etc. How do you indicate how the characters feel without them saying it in words?

Some tips for hinting at romantic feelings:

• Make the characters nervous and shy.
• Your protagonist leans forward.
• Asks deeper questions and listens intently.
• Finds ways to be close together.
• Mirrors their gestures.
• Gives lots of compliments.
• Makes eye contact, then looks away.
• Other people seem invisible to your protagonist.

A novel idea

Take it in turns to tell everyone else about a current project you’re working on (a book, screenplay, short story, etc.)

The other writers then brainstorm ideas for related stories you could write, or directions your project could take.  There are no right or wrong suggestions and the intention is to focus on big concepts, not little details.

This whole exercise takes around 15 minutes.

Creative writing prompts

Exercise for groups of 3-5

If you're in larger group, split up into groups of 3 or 4 people.

Everyone writes the first line of a story in the Zoom chat, or on paper. Other people can then choose this line as a writing prompt.

For this exercise:

• Say who the protagonist is.
• Reveal their motivation.
• Introduce any other characters

Once everyone's written a prompt, each author chooses a prompt (preferably someone eles's, but it can be your own if you feel really inspired by it.)  Then write for 10 minutes using this prompt. See if you can reveal who the protagonist is, what their motivation is (it can be a small motivation for a particular scene, it doesn't have to be a huge life goal), and introduce at least one new character.

Take turns reading out your stories to each other.

• Write in the first person.
• Have the protagonist interacting with an object or something in nature.
• The challenge is to create intrigue that makes the reader want to know more with just a single line.

Creative story cards / dice

Cut up a piece of paper and write one word on each of the pieces of paper, as follows:

Give each participant a couple of pieces of paper at random.  The first person says the first sentence of a story and they must use their first word as part of that sentence.  The second person then continues the story and must include their word in it, and so on.  Go round the group twice to complete the story.

You can also do this creative writing exercise with story dice, your own choice of words, or by asking participants to write random words down themselves, then shuffling all the cards together.

Alternative Christmas Story

Every Christmas adults tell kids stories about Santa Claus. In this exercise you write a Christmas story from an alternative dimension.

What if every Christmas Santa didn't fly around the world delivering presents on his sleigh pulled by reindeer? What if gnomes or aliens delivered the presents? Or perhaps it was the gnomes who are trying to emulate the humans? Or some other Christmas tradition entirely that we humans have never heard of!

Group writing exercise

If you're working with a group, give everyone a couple of minutes to write two possible themes for the new Christmas story. Each theme should be 5 words or less.

Shuffle the paper and distribute them at random. If you're working online, everyone types the themes into the Zoom or group chat. Each writer then spends 10 minutes writing a short story for children based on one of the two themes, or their own theme if they really want to.

If working alone, choose your own theme and spend 15 minutes writing a short story on it. See if you can create the magic of Christmas from another world!

Murder Mystery Mind Map

In a murder mystery story or courtroom drama, there's often conflicting information and lots of links between characters. A mind map is an ideal way to illustrate how everything ties together.

Split into groups of 3 or 4 people each and place a blank piece of A3 paper (double the size of A4) in the middle of each group. Discuss between you who the victim is and write their name in the middle of the piece of paper. Then brainstorm information about the murder, for example:

Feel free to expand out from any of these, e.g. to include more information on the different characters involved.

The idea is that  everyone writes at the same time!   Obviously, you can discuss ideas, but anyone can dive in and write their ideas on the mind map.

• Who was the victim? (job, appearance, hobbies, etc.)
• Who did the victim know?
• What were their possible motivations?
• What was the murder weapon?
• What locations are significant to the plot?

New Year’s resolutions for a fictional character

If you’re writing a piece of fiction, ask yourself how your protagonist would react to an everyday situation. This can help you to gain a deeper insight into who they are.

One way to do this is to imagine what their New Year’s resolutions would be.

If completing this exercise with a group, limit it to 3 to 5 resolutions per person. If some participants are historical fiction or non-fiction writers, they instead pick a celebrity and either write what their resolutions  will  be, or what their resolutions  should  be, their choice.

Verb Noun Fiction Exercise (Inspired by Stephen King)

Stephen King said, "I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops."

He also said, "Take any noun, put it with any verb, and you have a sentence. It never fails. Rocks explode. Jane transmits. Mountains float. These are all perfect sentences. Many such thoughts make little rational sense, but even the stranger ones (Plums deify!) have a kind of poetic weight that’s nice."

In this fiction writing exercise, start by brainstorming (either individually or collectively) seven verbs on seven different pieces of paper. Put those aside for later. Now brainstorm seven nouns. Randomly match the nouns and verbs so you have seven pairs. Choose a pair and write a piece of fiction for ten minutes. Avoid using any adverbs.

It’s the end of the world

It’s the end of the world!  For 5 minutes either:

If working as a team, then after the 5 minutes is up each writer reads their description out to the other participants.

• Describe how the world’s going to end, creating evocative images using similes or metaphors as you wish and tell the story from a global perspective, or
• Describe how you spend your final day before the world is destroyed.  Combine emotion and action to engage the reader.

7 Editing Exercises

For use after your first draft

I’ve listened to a lot of masterclasses on writing by successful authors and they all say variants of your first draft won’t be good and that’s fine. Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman summarise it the best:

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”  

Terry Pratchett

“For me, it’s always been a process of trying to convince myself that what I’m doing in a first draft isn’t important. One way you get through the wall is by convincing yourself that it doesn’t matter. No one is ever going to see your first draft. Nobody cares about your first draft. And that’s the thing that you may be agonising over, but honestly, whatever you’re doing can be fixed… For now, just get the words out. Get the story down however you can get it down, then fix it.”

Neil Gaiman

Once you’ve written your first draft, it will need editing to develop the plot, enhance the characters, and improve each scene in a myriad of ways – small and large. These seven creative editing exercises are designed to help with this stage of the process.

The First Sentence

Read the first paragraph of the novel, in particular the first sentence. Does it launch the reader straight into the action? According to  On Writing and Worldbuilding  by Timothy Hickson,  “The most persuasive opening lines are succinct, and not superfluous. To do this, it is often effective to limit it to a single central idea… This does not need to be the most important element, but it should be a central element that is interesting.” Ask yourself what element your opening sentence encapsulates and whether it’s the best one to capture your readers’ attention.

Consistency

Consistency is crucial in creative writing, whether it’s in relation to location, objects, or people.

It’s also crucial for personality, emotions and motivation.

Look at scenes where your protagonist makes an important decision. Are their motivations clear? Do any scenes force them to choose between two conflicting morals? If so, do you explore this? Do their emotions fit with what’s happened in previous scenes?

As you edit your manuscript, keep the characters’ personality, emotions and motivation in mind. If their behaviour is inconsistent, either edit it for consistency, or have someone comment on their strange behaviour or be surprised by it. Inconsistent behaviour can reveal that a character is keeping a secret, or is under stress, so characters don’t always need to be consistent. But when they’re not, there has to be a reason.  

Show Don’t Tell One

This exercise is the first in  The Emotional Craft of Fiction  by Donald Maass. It’s a writing guide with a plethora of editing exercises designed to help you reenergize your writing by thinking of what your character is feeling, and giving you the tools to make your reader feel something.  

• Select a moment in your story when your protagonist is moved, unsettled, or disturbed… Write down all the emotions inherent in this moment, both obvious and hidden.
• Next, considering what he is feeling, write down how your protagonist can act out. What is the biggest thing your protagonist can do? What would be explosive, out of bounds, or offensive? What would be symbolic? … Go sideways, underneath, or ahead. How can your protagonist show us a feeling we don’t expect to see?
• Finally, go back and delete all the emotions you wrote down at the beginning of this exercise. Let actions and spoken words do the work. Do they feel too big, dangerous, or over-the-top? Use them anyway. Others will tell you if you’ve gone too far, but more likely, you haven’t gone far enough.

Show Don’t Tell Two

Search for the following words in your book:

Whenever these words occur, ask yourself if you can demonstrate how your characters feel, rather than simply stating it. For each occasion, can you use physiological descriptors (a racing heart), actions (taking a step backwards) or dialogue to express what’s just happened instead? Will this enhance the scene and engage the reader more?

After The Action

Find a scene where your characters disagree – in particular a scene where your protagonist argues with friends or allies. What happens next?

It can be tempting to wrap up the action with a quick resolution. But what if a resentment lingers and mistrust builds? This creates a more interesting story arc and means a resolution can occur later, giving the character development a real dynamic.

Review how you resolve the action and see if you can stretch out the emotions for a more satisfying read.

Eliminating the Fluff

Ensure that the words used don’t detract from the enormity of the events your character is going through. Can you delete words like, “Quite”, “Little”, or “Rather”? 

Of “Very” Florence King once wrote: “ 'Very' is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen .” Delete it, or replace the word after it with a stronger word, which makes “Very” redundant.

“That,” is another common word used in creative writing which can often be deleted. Read a sentence as is, then reread it as if you deleted, “That”. If the meaning is the same, delete it.

Chapter Endings

When talking about chapter endings, James Patterson said,  “At the end, something has to propel you into the next chapter.”

Read how each of your chapters finish and ask yourself does it either:

• End on a cliff hanger? (R.L. Stine likes to finish every chapter in this method).
• End on a natural pause (for example, you’re changing point of view or location).

Review how you wrap up each of your chapters. Do you end at the best point in your story? Can you add anticipation to cliff hangers? Will you leave your readers wanting more?

How to run the writing exercises

The editing exercises are designed to be completed individually.

With the others, I've always run them as part of a creative writing group, where there's no teacher and we're all equal participants, therefore I keep any 'teaching' aspect to a minimum, preferring them to be prompts to generate ideas before everyone settles down to do the silent writing. We've recently gone online and if you run a group yourself, whether online or in person, you're welcome to use these exercises for free!

The times given are suggestions only and I normally get a feel for how everyone's doing when time's up and if it's obvious that everyone's still in the middle of a discussion, then I give them longer.  Where one group's in the middle of a discussion, but everyone else has finished, I sometimes have a 'soft start' to the silent writing, and say, "We're about to start the hour and a half of silent writing now, but if you're in the middle of a discussion, feel free to finish it first".

This way everyone gets to complete the discussion, but no-one's waiting for ages.  It's also important to emphasise that there's no wrong answers when being creative.

Still looking for more? Check out these creative writing prompts  or our dedicated Sci-Fi and Fantasy creative writing prompts

If you've enjoyed these creative writing exercises, please share them on social media, or link to them from your blog.

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• 29 brainstorming techniques: effective ...

29 brainstorming techniques: effective ways to spark creativity

Bright ideas don’t come as easily as flicking on a light. 

When it’s up to one individual to dream up a solution, it can be time-consuming and cause a lot of pressure. And when it comes to a group of people tasked with solving a problem, ideas might clash. Not to mention, everyone has a preferred method for their creative madness, making it difficult to get every team members’ wheels turning in the same direction.

That’s where brainstorming techniques come in. These techniques provide structure for brainstorming sessions, ignite creativity across all brainstormers, and ensure your ideas come to fruition. And luckily, there are lots of effective brainstorming techniques to choose from. 

What is brainstorming?

Here’s a general brainstorming definition: it’s an approach taken by an individual or team to solve a problem or generate new ideas for the improvement of a product, organization, or strategy. 

No matter your preferred method, most brainstorming techniques involve three steps:

Capture ideas

Discuss and critique the ideas

Choose which ideas to execute

Every brainstorming technique also involves the same ingredients. All you need is an individual or group of people, a problem to solve or an opportunity to address, and time. 

Brainstorming challenges

The golden rule of all brainstorming sessions is quantity over quality. The more ideas you have, the better your chances are that one will be worthy of execution. For these reasons, especially in group brainstorming sessions, be sure all team members check their criticisms at the door and let it be known that the only bad ideas are no ideas. 

Of course, not every brainstorming session will go off without a hitch. Some common brainstorming challenges include:

Unbalanced conversations, sometimes due to extroverts dominating discussions

The anchoring effect, meaning brainstormers cling to the first few ideas shared and don’t move on to others

Awkward silences, which often occur when participants are not prepared 

Perhaps you’ve experienced some of these uncomfortable brainstorming sessions yourself. Thankfully, there are plenty of tried-and-true, and also some unorthodox, brainstorming techniques and tools that tackle just these issues.

Analytic brainstorming techniques

When you need to look at an idea from all angles or vet a problem thoroughly, analytic brainstorming techniques might be worth implementing. Consider the following brainstorming methods and tools to generate and qualify ideas.

1. Starbursting  

A visual brainstorming technique, starbursting should be used once you or your team of brainstormers has homed in on a single idea. To begin starbursting, put an idea on the middle of a whiteboard and draw a six-point star around it. Each point will represent a question:

Consider every question and how it might pertain to your idea, such as, “Who will want to buy this product?” or, “When will we need to launch this program?” This will help you explore scenarios or roadblocks you hadn’t considered before.

Best for: large group brainstorms, vetting ideas thoroughly

2. The five whys, a.k.a. why analysis

Similar to starbursting, the five whys brainstorming technique helps you evaluate the strength of an idea. Challenge yourself to ask “why” questions about a topic or idea at least five times and consider what new problems you surface—and, importantly, note how you can address them. To help organize your thoughts, consider using a flowchart or fishbone diagram in hand with this brainstorming technique.

Best for: individual and group brainstorms, vetting ideas thoroughly

3. SWOT analysis

You might be familiar with SWOT analysis as it relates to strategic planning , and you might also be surprised to know that this concept can also be applied as a brainstorming exercise to help qualify an idea. The notion? Discuss the following aspects of your topic to determine whether it’s worth executing: 

Strengths : how does the idea dominate or stand out from competitors?

Weakness : are there any flaws in the idea that could jeopardize its execution?

Opportunities : what else can you capitalize on based on this idea?

Threats : what are potential downfalls that could arise if the idea is launched?

4. How Now Wow  

The How Now Wow brainstorming technique is all about categorizing ideas based on how unique they are and how easy they are to implement. Once you’ve collected several ideas, either individually or from team members, talk through where they fall in the How Now Wow spectrum:

How ideas are ideas that are original but not executable. 

Now ideas are unoriginal ideas that are easily executable.

Wow ideas are never-been-pitched before ideas that are also easy to implement.

Obviously, you want as many “Wow” ideas as possible since these are executable but also because they might set you apart from competitors or dispel monotony in a company. To help organize your ideas, consider using a matrix of four squares with difficulty weighted on the Y-axis and innovation on the X-axis. 

Best for: individual and group brainstorms, homing in on an executable solution

5. Drivers analysis

Just as the name implies, driver analysis is a brainstorming technique that analyzes the drivers or “causes” of a problem. To use this brainstorming technique, simply keep asking yourself or your team of brainstormers: “What’s driving [insert problem]?” and then, “What’s driving [insert answer to the previous question]?” Similar to why analysis, the deeper you dig into a problem, the more well-vetted it will be and the more confident you will be in executing solutions for those problems. 

6. Mind mapping

Another visual brainstorming technique, mind mapping addresses the anchoring effect—a common brainstorming challenge where brainstormers fixate on the first ideas instead of coming up with new ones. Mind mapping does this by using the first idea to inspire other ideas. 

You’ll need a large piece of paper or whiteboard to do this. Begin by writing down a topic and then drawing lines connecting tangential ideas to it. This essentially helps you paint a picture of your topic at hand and what might impact its execution or even expedite it.

Best for: individual and group brainstorms, visual thinkers

7. Gap filling, a.k.a. gap analysis

When you’re struggling with how to execute an idea, that’s where gap filling comes in—to address the obstacles standing in your way. Begin by starting with a statement of where you are and then a statement of where you want to be. For example, “Our company creates smart watches; we want to expand our portfolio to also include fitness trackers.”

It’s worth writing these out on a large piece of paper or a whiteboard for all of your brainstormers to see, perhaps using a flowchart or mind map to do so. Then, list obstacles that are preventing you from getting where you want to be and work through solutions for each of them. By the end of your brainstorming session, you should have a clearer plan of how to get where you want to be. 

Best for: individual and group brainstorms, visual thinkers, honing in on an executable solution

Quiet async brainstorming techniques

Best for businesses that are crunched for time or teams with more introverted individuals, these quiet brainstorming techniques allow brainstormers to contribute ideas on their own time and often anonymously. Look to the following methods to get your creative juices flowing, especially for remote teams with frequent virtual meetings .   

8. Brainwriting, a.k.a. slip writing

A nonverbal and in-person brainstorming technique, brainwriting addresses the brainstorming challenge of unbalanced conversations head-on. That’s because it requires participation and teamwork from every brainstormer, beginning with each person writing down three ideas relating to a topic on three separate slips of paper. Then everyone passes their ideas to the right or left and their neighbor builds on those ideas, adding bullet points and considerations. 

The slips of paper continue to be passed around the table until they’ve made it all the way around. Then, the brainstorm facilitator can digest all of the ideas themselves, or the brainstormers can discuss each idea out loud and determine what’s worth pursuing. Pro tip: limit this brainstorming technique to no more than 10 people to not be overwhelmed with ideas or time constraints.

Best for: group brainstorms and introverted team members

9. Collaborative brainwriting

You can think of collaborative brainwriting like a herd of cows grazing in a field, except it’s brainstormers grazing on ideas throughout a week, anonymously jotting down thoughts or ideas. Oftentimes a brainstorming facilitator will kick off this technique by posting a large piece of paper, sticky notes, or sharing a cloud-based document to jot down a few brainstorming ideas.

From there, team members can build off of those ideas on their own time and anonymously provide feedback. Be sure to set a clear deadline of when the brainstorming session closes to ensure all brainstormers have an opportunity to chime in.

Best for: individual brainstorming 

10. Brain-netting, a.k.a. online brainstorming

Great for remote teams, brain-netting is essentially a place for a team to brain dump their own ideas, whether that’s a Slack channel, Google Doc, or your project management tool . 

The notion is that brainstormers can add ideas whenever inspiration strikes and that the list will be ever-evolving. Of course, the team leader might want to inform their team of brainstormers of any important dates or deadlines when they need solutions to a problem. They may also want to hold a meeting to discuss the ideas. All brainstormers’ identities can be left anonymous even in the meeting. 

Best for: group brainstorms, introverted team members, remote teams

11. SCAMPER  

The SCAMPER brainstorming technique encourages brainstormers to look at an idea from different angles and it uses its acronym to inspire each lens: 

Substitute : consider what would happen if you swapped one facet of a solution for another.

Combine : consider what would happen if you combined one facet of a solution with another.

Adapt : consider how you could adapt an idea or solution in a new context.

Modify : consider how you can modify an idea to make it higher impact.

Put to another use : consider how else you could leverage your idea.

Eliminate : consider what you could remove from the idea or solution so that it’s simplified.

Reverse effective : finally, consider how you could reorganize an idea to make it most effective . 

When used in a group brainstorming session, you might want to use templates to track responses or pair the SCAMPER method with a brainwriting session to encourage all brainstormers to evaluate ideas from every angle. 

12. Lightning Decision Jam

Known as LDJ for short, the Lightning Decision Jam brainstorming technique requires 40 minutes to one hour to complete. What will you have by the end? Tangible results and buy-in from an entire team of brainstormers. 

This brainstorming technique is great for remote team alignment . It all begins with writing down positives about a topic or what’s working regarding the topic, then writing down negatives and identifying what needs to be addressed most urgently. This is followed by a few minutes of reframing problems as questions, then brainstorming solutions for those problems. 

Finally, your team uses a matrix to determine how high impact and how high effort your solutions are to decide which ideas are worth pursuing. For a more robust explanation of LDJ, watch this video by design agency AJ&Smart, which created the brainstorming technique. 

Best for: group brainstorms, remote workforces, tight deadlines, honing in on an executable solution

13. The idea napkin

Similar to LDJ, the idea napkin is essentially a brainstorming template that distills a broad topic into tangible solutions. How it works: Every brainstormer has an “idea napkin” that they commit one idea to, beginning by writing down their idea, as well as an elevator pitch for it. 

The idea napkin also includes a column for who the idea is targeting—meaning who you’re solving a problem for (customers, teammates, etc.)—and a column noting what problems your idea addresses. Brainstormers can fill out their napkins ahead of or during a brainstorming session, each is expected to present or share them. The final ideas will be placed on an impact and effort matrix to determine which are worth pursuing. 

Best for: group brainstorms, honing in on an executable solution

Roleplaying brainstorm techniques

Drama lovers rejoice! These roleplay brainstorming techniques encourage brainstormers to figuratively walk in someone else’s shoes or put on their hat—or six hats, in one instance—to address a problem or dream up ideas from a new perspective. An added benefit of this? When brainstormers take on a personality that’s not their own, it lowers inhibitions since it’s technically not their point of view being brought to the table.

14. Six thinking hats

This brainstorming technique requires a minimum of six brainstormers to wear imaginary hats—hence the name— that require them to look solely at an idea from one specific angle. For instance, one brainstormer might be wearing an impact hat and only concern themselves with the impact of an idea and another might be wearing a constraints hat and only looking at the constraints of an idea. 

You can pick and choose which angles are most important to your organization. And by the end of the group discussion, the whole brainstorming group should be able to hang their hats feeling confident about the ideas you’ll pursue.

Best for: group brainstorms (six or more people), introverted team members, vetting ideas thoroughly

15. Figure storming

Ever heard the phrase, “What would Abe do?” That’s pretty much the premise of this brainstorming technique in that brainstormers take on the identity of a famous or prominent figure, whether that’s a leader or celebrity, and put themselves in their brain space and how they’d approach an idea. 

This helps teams look at a topic through a different lens and, in the case of group brainstorms, alleviates any nervousness that brainstormers will put out bad ideas. Because they’re not putting out their ideas—they’re sharing someone else’s. So go on and give yourself a new job title for the day.

Best for: individual and group brainstorms, extroverted team members

16. Role storming  

Role storming is similar to figure storming in that brainstormers take on different personalities to dream up ideas, but with one dramatic twist—brainstormers act out those ideas. 

Generally, brainstormers are asked to take on the role of an average person who will be affected by the idea or solution in question, whether that’s an employee, client, or another party, and they act out a scenario that could stem from the idea to help them decipher what problems might arise from it. Consider this brainstorming technique for more extroverted teams. 

Best for: group brainstorms, extroverted team members

17. Reverse brainstorming

Reverse brainstorming is grounded in a little bit of chaos. It encourages brainstormers to play the role of disruptors by brainstorming problems first and then solutions. To kick off the brainstorming questions, a team leader will usually ask, “How do we cause [insert problem]?”

Once your team has listed the causes, they’ll have a new and different perspective for coming up with solutions to problems. 

Best for: group brainstorms, idea generation, problem-solving

18. Reverse thinking

Reverse thinking is a bit of a mashup of the figure storming and six thinking hats brainstorming techniques. It encourages brainstormers to merely ask themselves, “What would someone else do in this situation?” Then, it prompts them to think through why that person’s solution would work or not and if your current solution is more effective. 

Best for: group brainstorms, extroverted team members, vetting ideas thoroughly

Group brainstorm techniques

Most brainstorming techniques can be applied to groups of brainstormers, but these specific brainstorming techniques promote (and some even require) participation from everyone. When facilitated well, group brainstorming techniques not only yield more ideas but they can also:

Boost team morale through lighthearted brainstorming games and by involving participation in every step of the brainstorming process

Promote creative thinking, especially when brainstormers are given time to prepare their ideas and  a structured approach to solve problems

Bring more diverse ideas together, thanks to the unique perspective each brainstormer has and their individual strengths

All this to say, group brainstorming techniques are all about putting people’s heads together. 

19. Eidetic image method

The eidetic image method is grounded in setting intentions, and it begins with group members all closing their eyes to do just that. For example, if a company is setting out to design a new smartwatch, the brainstorming facilitator would encourage all brainstormers to close their eyes and quietly meditate on what smartwatches currently look like. 

Then the group would discuss and close their eyes once more and quietly imagine new features to add to the device. They’d all open their eyes and discuss again, essentially layering on the possibilities for enhancing a product. This brainstorming technique is ideal for revamping or building on an existing product or solution. 

Best for: visual thinkers, creating an idea anew

20. Rapid ideation

Great for teams that get sidetracked or have difficulty staying focused in meetings, the rapid ideation brainstorming technique encourages brainstormers to race against a clock and come up with as many ideas as possible—and importantly, not take themselves too seriously. This can be done by having brainstormers shout out ideas to a facilitator or write them on a piece of paper. You might find that some of the same ideas keep popping up, which likely means those are worth pursuing. 

Best for: extroverted team members, tight deadlines

21. Round-robin brainstorming

Participation is required for the round-robin brainstorming technique. Everyone must contribute at least one idea before the entire group can give feedback or share a second idea.

Given the requirement that everyone must share an idea, it’s best to allow brainstormers time to prepare ideas before each round-robin brainstorming session. This brainstorming technique is great for introverted team members and also for larger groups to ensure everyone can contribute. Moreover, the round-robin brainstorming technique also promotes the notion that the only bad idea is no idea. 

Best for: introverted team members and developing a surplus of ideas

22. Step-ladder brainstorming

Ideal for medium-sized groups of five to 15 people, the step-ladder brainstorming technique prevents ideas from being influenced by the loudest brainstormers of a group. 

Here’s how it works: A brainstorming facilitator introduces a topic to their group of brainstormers and then dismisses all but two brainstormers from the room. The two brainstormers left in the room discuss their ideas for a few minutes and then one brainstormer is welcomed back into the room and shares their ideas before the original two brainstormers divulge their ideas. 

Brainstormers are added back into the room one by one, with each new brainstormer sharing their ideas before the rest of the group divulges theirs, and so forth. Once the entire brainstorming group is back in the room, it’s time to discuss the ideas they’ve built together, step by step. 

Best for: introverted team members, vetting ideas thoroughly, honing in on an executable solution

23. Charrette

You might want to book a few rooms for this one. The charette brainstorming technique helps break up a problem into smaller chunks and also breaks up your brainstormers into separate teams to address them. 

For instance, you might reserve three rooms, write a topic or problem on a whiteboard, and have three sets of brainstormers walk into those rooms to jot down their ideas. Then, the sets of brainstormers rotate rooms and build off of the ideas of the group that was there before them. Consider it effective teamwork at its best.

Best for: vetting ideas thoroughly, honing in on an executable solution

More brainstorming techniques

For more unconventional approaches to get your individual or your team’s wheels turning, consider adding some of these brainstorming techniques to your arsenal of ways to ideate. 

24. ‘What if’ brainstorming

A very off-the-cuff brainstorming technique, “what if” brainstorming is as simple as throwing out as many “what if” questions surrounding a topic as possible, similar to the rapid ideation brainstorming technique. For instance, “what if this problem occurred in a different country,” or, “what if this problem occurred in the 1800s?” 

Walking through the scenarios might help spur new obstacles pertaining to your problem. Essentially, the “what if” brainstorming technique helps your team evaluate all the possibilities.

Best for: individual and group brainstorms, creating an idea anew, vetting ideas thoroughly

25. Change of scenery  

It’s no secret that physical surroundings can impact your team workflow and even creativity. When your brainstorming session is in a rut, consider relocating to another location, perhaps a park, a walking meeting, or even a coffee shop.

Being in a new setting might spur new ideas and even loosen up your brainstormers so that they’re more open to sharing ideas and helping you achieve quantity over quality.  

Best for: individual and group brainstorms, creating an idea anew

26. Random word picker

As this name implies, this brainstorming technique is a little random. Begin by tossing words into a hat and then pull them out and discuss how they relate to your brainstorming topic at hand. You may want to use a template to keep track of your thoughts and any new ideas the word association sparks.

To further organize your thoughts, consider pairing this brainstorming technique with word banking, meaning categorizing random words together and then drawing associations between their category and the brainstorming topic. 

Best for: group brainstorms, creating an idea anew

27. Storyboarding

Turns out, storyboarding isn’t only for television and film. You can also apply this as a brainstorming technique, meaning illustrating or drawing a problem and possible solutions. Consider it another way to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, especially those your solution impacts. It’s also a means to visualize any roadblocks you might experience when executing a solution. 

Best for: individual or group brainstorms, problem-solving, vetting ideas thoroughly

28. Wishing

Wishing is as simple as it sounds: You just wish for the solution you want to build. Think: “I wish our company was carbon neutral,” and then think of the possible ways in which you could achieve this, as well as areas that might be impossible to address for this. This will help uncover obstacles you might face and maybe even shed light on what you’re capable of overcoming. 

Best for: individual or group brainstorms, creating an idea anew

29. Crazy eights

A short and fun brainstorming technique, crazy eights delivers on quantity by encouraging brainstormers to think quickly using a template that has eight boxes and only eight minutes on the clock to sketch out eight ideas. Once the timer stops, the group discusses their ideas. 

For a larger group, consider having each brainstormer narrow in on only three ideas and give them a longer time limit of six minutes to sketch them out in more detail.

Best for: group brainstorms, visual thinkers, developing a surplus of ideas

8 tips for a productive brainstorming session

No matter which brainstorming technique is right for you and your team, consider the following best practices to brainstorm most effectively . Of course, it all begins with the brainstorming facilitator and how they set the tone for the session.

1. Allow time to prep 

A brainstorming facilitator isn’t the only one in a brainstorming session who needs time to prepare for a meeting . They also should give brainstormers some context ahead of the session, such as in the form of a meeting agenda , to get in the correct mindset for the brainstorming session. 

At least one day is standard but as little as two to 10 minutes is useful. Moreover, brainstorming facilitators should also have a few ideas in their back pocket for any creative ruts that might creep in.

2. Set a clear intention

The more context you can provide brainstormers from the get-go, the more fruitful ideas they can produce. For instance, clearly spell out what types of ideas you’re looking for. Whether it’s quickly executable ones or ones that are entirely pathbreaking, identify specific targets to address. 

Additionally, be sure to let brainstormers know of any constraints you or your organization is operating under, including project timelines or budgets, so they’re generating executable ideas.

3. Invite new teammates and ideas

When the same people brainstorm together over and over, they can tend to produce the same ideas over and over. For this reason, consider introducing new people to your brainstorming session to shake up the usual and lend a fresh perspective—and hopefully fresh ideas—to your brainstorming topics. Invitees can be colleagues from different departments, customers or clients for a focus group, or an outside consultant.

4. Promote inclusivity

Every brainstorming session should be considered a safe space to share ideas—even unconventional ones. Remember, the only bad ideas are no ideas, and any idea shared shouldn’t be shot down or judged. In addition, the brainstorm facilitator should ensure every brainstormer is treated equally and given the same amount of time to talk. This might mean setting a timer for each brainstormer to talk and acknowledging those who are dominating conversations. Likewise, every brainstormer should be open and curious to ideas.

5. Think out of the box

Creative thinking begins with not taking ourselves too seriously. Just as you encourage inclusivity, encourage imperfections and out-of-the-box thinking, too. This could include anything from fun team building games to unique icebreaker questions. Hey, even a bevy of silly ideas to build off of is better than no ideas at all. Brainstorming techniques like wishing can encourage team members to open up.

6. Amplify creativity with music

Similar to how a change of scenery can inspire new ideas, even a little background music can promote creativity. Consider putting some on for your brainstorming session, and for the best results ensure it’s:

Instrumental

In a major key

On a fixed tempo and volume

7. Mix and match brainstorming techniques

Just as brainstorming techniques aren’t necessarily one-size-fits-all, they also aren’t all one-type-fits-every-session. Be prepared to pivot your brainstorming technique depending on what your group of brainstormers is most receptive to and also how many ideas you're juggling. 

8. Execute your ideas 

Coming up with bright ideas is great. But they’re pretty useless unless you effectively execute them. While some brainstorming techniques build the execution process into them, others might require you to follow up with brainstormers using project templates to map out a plan using creative solutions. 

Brainstorming is about quantity over quality

When done right, a brainstorming session shouldn’t feel like a chore but rather an opportunity to create something together, especially when your brainstorming technique supports different styles of thinking and expression. 

And whether you're operating as an individual or on a team, there’s something uniquely satisfying about seeing your ideas come to fruition. Get the creative ideas flowing, then customize your workflow management tool to turn those ideas into action. 

Related resources

4 ways to establish roles and responsibilities for team success

Listening to understand: How to practice active listening (with examples)

Unmasking impostor syndrome: 15 ways to overcome it at work

How to accomplish big things with long-term goals

Brainstorming Topics: 24 Great Topics to Get Creativity Flowing

These brainstorming topics are a great place to start if you are looking for a new creative idea for your writing work.

A brainstorming session can be a great way to get new ideas for a blog post, article, book, podcast, short story or even a novel. If you’re hoping to get the creative juices flowing or struggle with writer’s block and want to start thinking creatively again, brainstorming is the place to start. There are many brainstorming techniques you can use to get the ideas flowing. Some of the more popular ones include:

• Listing or Bulleting
• Clustering or Mind Mapping
• Guided Brainstorming
• Group Brainstorming
• Brainwriting
• Rapid Ideation
• Storyboarding

Sometimes before you can begin brainstorming, you need the right central idea. Use it as a jumping-off point. Our article packed full of brainstorming tips explains more. Here are some brainstorming topics that can start the process. These topics are intentionally vague and open-ended because your mind can take you down many different paths as you explore them.

General Brainstorming Ideas for Those New to Brainstorming

1. childhood memories, 2. global warming, 3. impact of education, 4. a social controversy, 5. the impact of pets on your life, 6. write about a particular culture, brainstorming topics for students, 7. your favorite historical character, 9. great literature, 10. enterpreneurship and innovation, brainstorming strategies for marketing professionals, 11. a bad idea, 12. one big idea, brainstorming topics for creatives, 13. a mood board, 14. an inspiring image, brainstorming topics for writing, 15. memoir and personal experience, 16. fantasy and world-building , 17. sci-fi , 18. historical fiction, 20 romance and relationships, 21. mystery and suspense, 22. adventure and exploration, 23. dystopian and satire, 24. philosophical and thought-provoking.

If you are new to brainstorming, here are some ideas to get you started on the activity:

Childhood is something that has many different subtopics a writer could explore. You could talk about the emotions of childhood, or you could write about the responsibilities of childhood. This is an effective brainstorming starting point because everyone has a childhood. Whether it was a good one or a bad one, this is a universal topic that all writers can write on.

Because this is such a broad topic, you have many different paths you can go down for your brainstorming. Some ideas include vacations you took as a child, favorite toys you had, people who influenced or were important to you as a child.

Global warming is another broad topic that works well as a brainstorming idea. You can explore your opinion, discuss the human impact on global warming, and discuss its economic, geographic, and political impacts. As you brainstorm this topic, consider potential solutions you find. Add a section to your concept map that discuss solutions. After completing this activity, you will find multiple options to write about with this one broader topic.

Education is another broad topic that can work well for brainwriting activities. You can write about its impact on your life personally or its impacts on society. You can have a subtopic that explores some of the benefits of the right education or the drawbacks of a flawed educational system.

Education also gives you the chance to brainstorm techniques. What works in education, and what doesn’t? What is the role of the teacher and the student in education? The answers to these questions provide much information you can transform into articles and papers.

Another effective brainstorming technique is to take a current social controversy and make it your central idea. Then, spend time exploring the who, what, where, when, and how surrounding this topic. You can share ideas to solve the issue or explore potential causes, depending on your goal for the activity.

This topic can be effective if you brainstorm ideas for a blog post. You can engage with your audience well when you talk about something important to them, and social controversies tend to fit the bill well. You can also get a lot of engagement when using a hot-button topic like this.

Pets are something many people feel strongly about. If you have a pet, you know how close you can get to them. Consider using “pets” as the main topic in your freewriting activity, and then branch off with the different subtopics.

You can explore many things with this topic. For instance, you can look at the emotions you feel about your pet or have a subtopic that explores pet care concerns. You can talk about ethics and costs, as well.

Is there a culture you would like to learn about or know quite a bit about and would like to study further? This can be a great brainstorming topic. Start with the culture as your central idea, and then brainstorm facts about it.

What influences have you seen on the culture? What are some facts about it that are worth exploring? How has the culture changed? These are the ideas that can create the subtopics for your brainstorming session.

These ideas might get you started by brainstorming a topic for a research paper or essay.

Is there someone from history that you enjoy studying? This could be your brainstorming topic. Put that character as your central topic, and then brainstorm and map about them.

You’ll find quite a few paths to follow with this idea. Start with biographical information as one branch of your mind map, then move to impact and political or societal views for additional branches. As you dig into the research, add even more to the map until you have a full picture of who they are and how they impacted society.

Do you have a passion for weather or physics, or chemistry? Pick a science-related topic, and build that into your brainstorming session. You can delve deep into various aspects of the topic as you brainstorm.

This brainstorming topic works well if you need to write an academic paper. It also works if you are just interested in the topic in general.

A final idea for brainstorming topics is to look more closely at a particular piece of literature. Place the work’s title at the center of your concept map, then build branches to talk about characters, setting, and plot. You can also explore alternate endings to get some creative writing in.

If you write your work, you can use this idea to get your creativity flowing. Place the title or main plot point in the center of your graph, and start brainstorming. For some inspiration, read our guide to classic literature books .

The vibrant world of entrepreneurship and innovation has its unique allure. Students might entertain the creation of community-centric business models. Additionally, they could weigh in on how budding entrepreneurs are poised to redefine tomorrow.

History, with its tapestry of events and figures, offers a treasure trove of topics. Imagine if key historical events had taken a different turn? Or how about delving into the lives and legacies of influential leaders?

Brainstorming in the professional environment happens all the time. Some of the best ideas come from group brainstorming sessions. If you need help getting started, rather than taking on a topic, consider one of these activities:

If you’re looking for the next great idea with your group, consider listing the bad ideas first. This gives you room to state an idea that you think is bad, but it might actually be good, but it also lets you get all of your creativity out. Often, you will find some gems even within those ideas you think are bad. 

Remember, brainstorming aims to get all of the topics out. Some won’t be important to your writing or your project, but stating them is a good starting point. If you’re brainstorming in a group, letting them state their bad ideas first is a good way to break the ice and make people feel less inhibited about sharing their real ideas.

In marketing, you often start with a big idea or promotion, but you need to find a way to get that idea or promotion into the minds and eyes of your target audience. You can use a brainstorming session to do this.

Start with your big idea as the central point. Then, have you or your team break it down into smaller parts. Soon you will come up with different avenues you can tap as you work towards reaching your audience with your main marketing message. 

If you are creative in any industry, you know the frustration when your ideas run dry. Here are some brainstorming topics and ideas that can get your creativity flowing again.

The mood of the creator inspires much creativity. Create a board where you can brainstorm about a particular mood. For instance, you can add adjectives, images, and colors you associate with that mood. 

Make this brainstorming activity highly visual—the more visual, the better. With the images and ideas on your board, you will have a starting point for your creative work.

Whether it is something from nature or a classic artwork, find an inspiring image to start your brainstorming session. Put the image, rather than a word, at the center of your mind map or brainstorming flow chart. Then, build ideas from it.

You may find inspiration for a work of fiction in this way or an idea for your piece of art. Using the beauty around you can easily inspire your creative side if you spend a little time thinking about what you see. 

Deciding what you want to write about next and exploring your ideas is ripe for brainstorming. But sometimes, it helps to be more specific. Try these brainstorming topics for writing:

Diving into the depths of personal experiences, memoirs present a rich tapestry of emotions and events. Writers can explore pivotal moments that drastically changed the course of their lives. Alternatively, they could unravel an unexpected encounter with a stranger that left an indelible mark on their psyche. Venturing into the realm of dreams, one might pen down the most vivid and bewildering dream they’ve ever had, weaving it with real-life implications and interpretations. Read our guide to the best memoirists .

Consider a universe where shadows take on their own lives, having untold secrets and tales. Or, delve into the intricacies of a mystical tribe just discovered, detailing their rituals, customs, and magical practices. You could brainstorm about the intriguing concept of a common creature, perhaps something as humble as a rabbit or a butterfly, suddenly gaining unprecedented power and upending the established order. Read our guide to the best fantasy books .

Science fiction propels readers into the unknown, pushing the boundaries of current understanding. Envision Earth’s transformation after establishing contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. Brainstorm about what if time travel became possible? Dive into the moral dilemmas and societal changes such a breakthrough might entail. In a more abstract vein, imagine a dystopian future where raw emotions become commodities, traded and sold amongst individuals. 

History is always a good muse for writers. Imagine a clandestine romance blossoming amidst the vibrant backdrop of the Renaissance. Or, brainstorm the inner turmoil of a soldier caught in the crossfires of a devastating historical war. Through the eyes of a commoner, writers can also capture the essence of a major city during a significant historical event, blending factual events with fictional flourishes.

19. Horror and Thriller

Picture a quaint town with a chilling secret: every resident inexplicably goes mute for one day each year. Or, delve into the consequences that unfurl when someone stumbles upon an old tome with the sinister power to control minds. Adding a touch of mystery, brainstorm a detective’s harrowing journey as they become obsessed with a crime that evidence suggests might never have happened. Read our guide to the best horror authors .

Romance, with its myriad of emotions, offers vast narrative possibilities. Think of a heart-wrenching love story where two souls from parallel universes cross paths. Reflect on the challenges and bittersweet moments of a love story set in a world where humans only live for 30 years. Or, brainstorm a tale of two bibliophiles who, over time, fall in love through letters secretively left within the pages of a shared library book.

Mysteries have an innate allure, drawing readers into their web of intrigue. What could be the hidden story behind a series of anonymous gifts a woman receives every spring? Upon noticing the peculiar habits of a town’s residents, a journalist could embark on a quest for truth, revealing dark secrets. Alternatively, writers can craft a suspense-filled narrative about passengers on a stranded train, discovering unexpected ties that bind them together.

Adventures, with their thrill and unpredictability, make for captivating tales. Brainstorm the perilous journey of adventurers on a quest to discover a mythical city built entirely of gold. Dive into a child’s exhilarating escapade in a world that comes to life within a painting, complete with challenges and allies. Or, delve deep underwater, following explorers as they navigate an uncharted cave system’s dark, beautiful corridors.

The dystopian genre pushes writers to consider stark, often bleak, versions of the future. Brainstorm a tightly controlled society where memories are archived and any undesirable ones can be selectively erased. In stark contrast, picture a world reclaimed by nature, where humanity’s remnants grapple with survival. Or, peer into the daily lives of individuals residing under a massive dome after Earth’s atmosphere turns deadly. Read our guide to the best satire  authors

For those seeking deeper introspection, philosophical themes can be a goldmine. Contemplate on the very essence of human nature by exploring whether true altruism exists. Envision a society sculpted by the impossibility of deceit, where every spoken word is the absolute truth. Or, in a poignant narrative twist, imagine the intricacies of living in a world where everyone knows their exact date of death from the moment they’re born. Read our guide to the best philosophy books .

For more brainstorming ideas, check out our round-up of the best software for brainstorming .

Brainstorming Techniques: 15 Creative Activities to Do Solo or as a Team

Updated: August 15, 2022

Published: August 20, 2021

We're all familiar with traditional brainstorming as a way to produce new ideas. You sit in a room with a whiteboard and work with whatever comes to mind. Maybe you play a few rounds of word association to strengthen your ideas, or pull up Google and use research to flesh them out.

But there are many alternative exercises for tackling problems and developing new ideas, both individually and in a group setting.

Ranging from structured to silly, here are the best creative brainstorming exercises and techniques to help you get your problem-solving juices flowing. This list is a modified excerpt from my guide Creative Ideation for Digital Marketers: Theory to Practice .

Brainstorming Techniques

• Storyboarding
• Mind Mapping
• Word Banking
• S.C.A.M.P.E.R.
• S.W.O.T. Analysis
• Reverse Brainstorming

1. Storyboarding

If you're trying to design a process, storyboarding can help you see where your collective understanding of a problem supports or conflicts with a proposed solution, and where more thought/research is needed. By developing a visual story to explore the problem as a narrative, your team will be able to see how ideas interact and connect to form a solution.

Sticky notes are your friend. Take a few minutes to write out your ideas as individual notes. These don't have to be complete thoughts — physically pinning up quotes, pictures, user info, and the like can help you see new relationships between different components.

Once you have a group of sticky notes to work from, start arranging them on the board as a progression: first this, then that. Organizing your ideas as a continuous series will help you see new connections and eliminate extraneous material that doesn't support your end goal.

Why This Brainstorming Technique Works

• Storyboarding allows you to see your ideas in a sequential pattern.
• You’ll be able to see an overarching overview of a new or current process — without digging too deeply into the details.
• You can start from anywhere — the beginning, middle, or end — then fill in the blanks.

How to Use It in Marketing

Storyboarding is particularly useful for marketers. With it, you can:

• Outline the sequential process of a marketing campaign from beginning to completion.
• Improve an internal process such as backlink-building by drafting specific steps.
• Storyboard a marketing video from beginning to end.

2. Mind Mapping

Mind mapping is a fairly common term nowadays — in fact, many types of software provide automated mind-mapping templates so you can better organize your data. Well, it also happens to be a great way to organize your ideas.

• To create a mind map for creativity purposes, write down the task or problem you're trying to solve at the center of your idea sheet (feel free to do this on your computer, but whiteboards are ideal).
• Then, expand on this problem by surrounding it with terms that better describe what you need. If your problem is low website traffic, for example, some terms to write around this phrase might be "organic traffic," "trusted content," "SEO," and "video strategy."
• Once your mind map has this first layer, add a second layer to each of your needs describing how you might be able to solve for these individual challenges. Around "SEO," you might write " topic clusters ," "dedicated SEO strategist," and "video marketing course."

Keep adding to your mind map using the steps above until you've sufficiently broken down your problem into manageable parts. It's a fantastic problem-solving technique that fosters creative answers to subjects that might otherwise seem uninspiring.

• Mind mapping allows you to start from any point and create clusters of potential processes.
• You don’t need to have an order in mind; you can prioritize later.
• You can add a myriad of topically relevant ideas as you go; with mind mapping, you never feel boxed-in.

In marketing, you can use mind mapping tools to solve problems, like in the example above. You can also use it to:

• Draft content maps for your entire blog or website. You can begin with an overarching topic, then begin creating branches for each subtopic.
• Come up with marketing campaign ideas divided by major topics and subtopics.
• Create Yes/No scenarios for placing different lead segments into specific drip campaigns.

3. Word Banking

If you assume "work banking" is a fancy term for "word association," well, you're right. But in a word banking session, what you do with the words you come up with is much more sophisticated.

While word associations often focus on pairs of words, word banking asks you to form big groups of terms that all describe just a few themes or topics. Creating word banks in a business setting can help you dismantle a project into manageable parts — kind of like a mind map.

Then, when your work bank is complete, you can retroactively form connections between the terms you came up with, and use those connections to craft ideas that are guaranteed to include all of your most important characteristics.

• Word association is a relatively natural, low-effort task — simply begin with a big idea, then begin jotting down anything that comes up for you.
• It doesn’t require you to know the when, why, or how of an idea.
• Word banking will surface gasps in your knowledge. If you find yourself stuck, it’s time to complete additional research.

Word banking is ideal for content projects and can be a precursor for more in-depth keyword research. Use word banking to:

• Surface everything you know about a topic you’re thinking of tackling in your blog or website.
• “Word vomit” blog post ideas without feeling boxed into a formal keyword research process.
• Uncover where you and your teammates may need additional training. For instance, if you choose to start a word bank for “ conversion rate optimization ” and the term “ A/B testing ” never comes up, it may be time to sign everyone up for a CRO course.

4. S.C.A.M.P.E.R.

S.C.A.M.P.E.R. is essentially a process for expanding and improving upon ideas by testing and questioning them from different angles. For each letter of the mnemonic, ask yourself a related question about your project or the problem at hand:

• Substitute : What would happen to the project if we swapped X for Y?
• Combine : What would happen to the project if we combined X and Y?
• Adapt : What changes would need to be made to adapt this project to a different context?
• Modify : What could we modify to create more value on this project?
• Put to another use : What other uses or applications might this project have?
• Eliminate : What could we remove from the project to simplify it?
• Reverse : How could we reorganize this project to make it more effective?

This method forces you to approach your project or problem in unexpected ways. Each question asks you to dig a little deeper into the issue and consider new possibilities.

• S.C.A.M.P.E.R. will get you to think beyond predefined assumptions about your product or project.
• The series of “would” and “could” questions let your mind run free with minimal commitment to any actual change or alteration.
• It allows you to improve a process even if you believe the process has reached its optimal form.

While S.C.A.M.P.E.R. might seem like a brainstorming activity for product development teams, it can serve marketing teams just as well. Use it to:

• Improve a current process — such as keyword research or market research — by substituting, combining, and adapting tasks.
• Optimize the copy of a blog post or campaign by crafting hypothetical changes that could improve the piece. These changes could make it easier to “template” the piece.
• Build a drip campaign that effectively gets leads to convert by modifying and substituting certain email messages.

5. S.W.O.T. Analysis

Entrepreneurs and business leaders know exactly what a SWOT analysis is. Well, it also happens to be a helpful brainstorming exercise.

S.W.O.T. stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. When launching a company, it's your textbook starting point (literally — there isn't a single business school textbook in the world that doesn't have a version of it).

But while a company's founder might use a SWOT analysis to create his or her business model, brainstormers can use the same diagram to better organize their ideas.

Your SWOT analysis doesn't have to be all that complicated when brainstorming. In fact, it can simply be four columns on a whiteboard during your average "shout it out" ideas meeting. When thinking of a new logo design, for instance, ask yourself what you like most about your current logo (strengths). What do you dislike about it (weaknesses)? What should it have more of (opportunities)? What other company logos should you be mindful of (threats)?

• A S.W.O.T analysis will effectively put you in problem-solving mode before problems ever arise.
• It takes into account competitive advantages and disadvantages — a consideration that often comes long after brainstorming.
• You’ll get a much more detailed and comprehensive overview of what can be improved.

S.W.O.T analyses are typically used in business and entrepreneurship, but marketers can use it to:

• Improve a social or search engine campaign before launch and find out where you may have opportunities or be facing threats.
• Create a much better project plan for clients by analyzing the project’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Audit an existing process within the team, such as handoffs to sales or content creation.

6. Zero Draft

The Zero Draft is an ideation technique often used by writers and is essentially a form of focused free-writing. For marketers and agency professionals, it can help focus the first stages of a new project by establishing what you currently know and getting your initial ideas out of your brain and onto paper.

Taking your central theme or topic:

• Write down everything you currently know about the subject.
• Write down what you need or want to know about the subject, but don't currently know.
• Reflect on why the subject is important.
• Add anything else that takes your fancy — this is a chance to get whatever's floating around in your head out into the world.

The Zero Draft method is all about getting everything you can think of relating to your topic down on paper, so don't be concerned if it looks messy and unfocused. The goal is just to get past the initial block that often plagues creative professionals in the early stages of a new project.

• The Zero Draft method has minimal constraints while allowing you to make sense of your ideas in coherent sentences.
• It’s especially a good fit for those who like to write their ideas down.
• As opposed to a whiteboard session, Zero Drafting allows you to document your thoughts in a more permanent format.

Zero Drafting has ample uses in marketing. Use it to:

• Draft a blog post, article, or page from start to finish without stopping.
• Create a preliminary outline for a marketing video or video advertisement.
• Map the sequence of a new client project or internal project.

7. Reverse Brainstorming

In certain corporations and government entities, data security is the highest priority. So high, in fact, that these organizations have been known to hire hackers — many of whom have committed internet crimes — to hack their systems and find out where the weaknesses are.

This "reverse" approach to security, wherein you hack your own company, is considered one of the best ways to secure a server from intrusion. And for us, it's the inspiration behind this fourth brainstorming technique.

When you reverse brainstorm, you essentially work to create problems rather than solutions. “Why on Earth would you want to do that?” you might ask. Creating problems teaches you what not to do so you're more intuitive to the needs of your project. Think of it like hacking your company to find out where the weaknesses are.

Say, for example, you want to drive awareness to a new product. As a marketer, you have many promotional channels at your disposal, but you don't know how to use them or where to start. In a reverse brainstorming session, you might come up with the following:

• Avoid hyperlinks to the product's purchase page
• Don't tweet about the product
• Criticize the features of your product

Obviously, these are all horrible ideas if your goal is to promote the product. But, take the reverse of these ideas, and you've effectively created three excellent starting points for a supportive campaign: Link to the product in a series of blog posts, develop a Twitter campaign around the product, and identify specific features of the product that prospects would be most interested in reading or hearing about.

• Reverse brainstorming tells you what to avoid from the get-go.
• It’s easier to start with what to not to do rather than what to do — the latter of which can make us feel stuck.
• It helps you avoid decision fatigue early on in the ideation process.

As referenced above, you can use reverse brainstorming to come up with actions for promoting a new product. You can also use it to:

• Come up with the top worst clients you could attract to your company, which would tell you the types of leads you should pursue.
• Create the worst verbiage you could use in your ads, which would tell you the type of tone and wording you should use in your campaigns.
• Outline what failure looks like for your team, which you could then use to come up with new goals and objectives.

Are you brainstorming with your group or team? While all of the activities above could be used in a group setting, there are a few exercises that are made specifically for groups. Let’s take a look at the ones you could use below.

Group Brainstorming Techniques

1. group sketching.

You don't have to be an artist or a designer to benefit from sketching. Visual thinking can help to trigger and develop ideas that discussion and writing might otherwise leave unturned. Similar to brain-writing, group sketching involves participants building on each other's ideas.

Each member of your team will sketch an image related in a central way to a concept, idea, or topic you want to explore further. Each sketch is then passed to someone else, who sketches another related image on the same piece of paper. This is repeated multiple times around the group. The final images are then reviewed and discussed with the aim of discovering connections that individuals hadn't spotted on their own.

2. Brain Netting

Creative exercises and ideas meetings always go better the more people you have in the room. Unfortunately, that means remote employees might not be solicited for their input as much as they should be. Brain netting is the act of connecting with folks electronically to make sure everyone can offer their input and feedback on a project.

Brain netting doesn't just have to be a group phone call, though. Company messaging platforms like Slack are the perfect way to get everyone into a chatroom to spill their ideas. As ideas are submitted, each chatroom member can vote for their favorites and combine the best qualities of multiple concepts.

3. Questioning Assumptions

We all carry assumptions with us — assumptions about what’s possible, what isn't possible, what people want, what will work, and what won't. This exercise forces us to challenge these assumptions and put everything on the table.

Draw up a list of all the assumptions you can think of about your current project — true or not — and discuss the list as a group, questioning each one. Doing this at various stages in your campaign development can spark fresh ideas, as well as identify knowledge gaps.

This technique encourages your team to let imaginations run wild. Ask participants to dream up the most unattainable, extreme, and impractical solutions they can think of to a given problem. Create a list of a few dozen wishes pertaining to the task at hand.

Focusing on a selection of wishes, consider and discuss the ideas in detail, with the aim of triggering new but more realistic concepts to pursue. What makes them so impossible? How can that idea be scaled down? Which features of that wish could we integrate into this other approach? You might be surprised to discover applicable, real-world solutions among your team's wildest wishes.

5. Alter-Egos / Heroes

This is a fun exercise where small groups imagine how they would go about solving a given problem if their team were led by a famous character, fictional or real. How would Cat Woman go about positioning your brand as a thought leader in virtual reality? What would Steve Jobs do to improve your latest communications package? How would Don Draper get your core messages across to millennials?

You can either choose someone you think embodies the right qualities for the job to help develop your vision, or someone at the opposite end of that scale, to explore less conventional ideas.

6. Six Thinking Hats

There's a whole host of problem-solving exercises and tools that help participants to put themselves into the shoes of another. This particular tool was invented by Edward de Bono, a psychologist, author, and consultant who pioneered the technique in his 1985 book Six Thinking Hats . The method involves breaking down ideas into six areas of thought:

• Logic : The facts.
• Optimism : The value and the benefits.
• Devil’s Advocate : The difficulties and the dangers.
• Emotion : Feelings and intuitions.
• Creativity : Possibilities and new ideas.
• Management : Making sure that the rules of the hat are observed.

When approaching a new problem or project, have each member of your team put on one of these different "hats" for the discussion. Each "hat" represents a unique set of priorities and perspectives that will help focus your discussion and consider the project from a wide variety of angles.

For example, if you're wearing the "Devil's Advocate" hat, it's your job to consider the project's limitations and challenges. It may feel uncomfortable at first to temporarily adopt a very narrow form of thinking, but the extremes can help teams fully explore a project.

7. Forced Connections

This exercise involves bringing together ideas that serve very different needs or interests to form a new concept. You see this sort of thinking all the time in products like the Apple Watch, the Swiss Army knife, smartphones, or even sofa beds.

To put this method into practice, bring a bag of random items to your next meeting, or draw up two lists of unrelated items on the board. Ask team members to pick two or more items and explore different ways they can be connected. This technique can produce some silly results, but it's ultimately a helpful way of getting your team out of a creative rut.

8. Brain-Writing

In this exercise, participants simply write down a few rough ideas for solving a particular problem on a piece of paper. Each piece of paper is then passed on to someone else, who reads it silently and adds their own ideas to the page. This process is repeated until everyone has had a chance to add to each original piece of paper. The notes can then be gathered, ready for discussion.

The big advantage of brain-writing is that it makes sure everybody is given the opportunity to have their thoughts and ideas thoroughly considered by the group. This avoids the loudest or most extroverted people unintentionally dominating the sessions.

For some teams, brainstorming might come easily — they might even have a process in place. For other teams, it’s not as easy, even if they have a handful of activities they know they’d like to use. Below, I’ll cover how you can get the most out of your brainstorming session.

How to Brainstorm Ideas

• Focus on quantity over quality.
• Selectively apply constraints to keep the session focused.
• Don’t prune ideas as you brainstorm.
• Never finalize or commit during the brainstorming session.
• Look to other sources for inspiration.
• Use a whiteboard (and take pictures of each whiteboarding session).
• Take breaks.

1. Focus on quantity over quality.

Brainstorming is all about “vomiting” any and all ideas you have — no matter how silly they may seem. (And trust me, there are no silly ideas in a brainstorming session.) For that reason, don’t worry about coming up with quality ideas and instead focus on quantity.

Write down anything that you or your team have come up with. What may seem implausible now may be what your team chooses to pursue later.

2. Selectively apply constraints to keep the session focused.

While you should come up with as many ideas as possible, you shouldn’t run all over the place, crossing topics that are irrelevant or that are unattainable for various reasons. Consider creating budgetary constraints, establishing a timeline, and putting up guardrails that will keep your brainstorming session in line with your goals.

For instance, if your budget for a new marketing campaign is $2,000, but you know you don’t want to spend it on pay-per-click ads, you can spend your brainstorming power on other avenues.

3. Don’t prune ideas as you brainstorm.

Resist the urge to prune ideas as you come up with them. Even if you think you’ve got a much better idea at hand, let that old idea sit there — you might use it later on another project, or even in the second phase of your current project. Ideas that seem obsolete can also act as guardrails later on.

4. Never finalize or commit during the brainstorming session.

When you get an excellent idea during your brainstorming session, you might feel tempted to commit to it and set it aside, then continue brainstorming other ideas. The problem with that approach is that it limits you considerably, because now you’re brainstorming around that one idea rather than brainstorming freely. Without knowing it, you’ll anchor your brainstorming on that idea to make it come to fruition.

The goal of brainstorming, of course, is to finalize one final concept. But until you’ve tackled the concept from all possible angles, don’t commit to a certain idea until you’ve laid out all of the routes you could take.

5. Look to other sources for inspiration.

When you get stuck, it’s imperative to look at the competition to get inspiration — especially in marketing. What are they doing that you could imitate? Which ideas could you bounce off of? Even the most productive brainstorming sessions will come to a halt at one point, and inspiration will go a long way in jumpstarting your session again.

You might even print out certain images, articles, and campaigns to keep your team inspired as you work.

6. Use a whiteboard (and take pictures of each whiteboarding session).

Using a whiteboard might seem like the stereotypical brainstorming route, but it has its merits: It allows your team to get any and all ideas out in a seemingly impermanent way. No idea is too silly to write on a whiteboard because you can easily erase it.

Of course, I wouldn’t suggest erasing your sessions; take photos of your finished whiteboards to keep all of your ideas on record. Remember to pair whiteboarding with a creative brainstorming exercise. Instead of writing “[Topic] Brainstorming Session” up top and letting anyone chime in, create a chart for a S.W.O.T analysis, or list different alter-egos to detail how they’d promote your product.

7. Take breaks.

If you want to stay productive during your brainstorming session, it’s imperative to take breaks. Let your team take a walk, scroll through social media, or go out for a bite. Do brainstorming in short bursts, or do it in long blocks. Whatever you do, schedule breaks for your team to ensure everyone’s minds are as clear as possible during the process.

Use Creative Brainstorming Techniques to Ideate Better

Traditional brainstorming is dead. Your team no longer has to sit in a circle in silence while you try to write ideas on an empty whiteboard. Use the above exercises to come up with powerful marketing projects, advertisements, and campaigns that empower your team and your company to grow better.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in November 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Growth Tactics

20 Easy and Fun Brainstorming Activities for Team Building

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Brainstorming is a great way to bring a team together and generate as many ideas as possible. Below are some effective brainstorming techniques to help your team come up with creative ideas and solutions.

What is the purpose of brainstorming?

Brainstorming is a way to generate creative ideas and solutions to problems. The purpose of brainstorming is to encourage free thinking and open discussion and to generate a large number of ideas quickly. It’s a collaborative process that involves a group of people coming together to share their ideas and build on each other’s thoughts.

The goal of brainstorming is to break down barriers and encourage creativity. By creating a safe and supportive environment, team members can feel comfortable sharing their ideas, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant. This can lead to innovative solutions and new ways of thinking.

Brainstorming is also a way to generate a large number of ideas quickly. By using techniques such as mind mapping , reverse brainstorming, and round-robin brainstorming, teams can generate a large number of ideas in a short amount of time. This can be helpful when trying to solve complex problems or come up with new ideas for a project.

Another benefit of brainstorming is that it builds team morale and fosters collaboration. By working together to generate ideas, team members can feel more connected and invested in the project. This can lead to a more positive work environment and better outcomes.

So, if you’re looking for new ideas or solutions to a problem, brainstorming is a great place to start. By using brainstorming techniques and creating a supportive environment, you can come up with innovative solutions and new ways of thinking.

Brainstorming Activities for Team Building

Mind Mapping

Mind mapping is a visual brainstorming technique that involves writing down a central idea or problem, then drawing branches from it and writing related ideas on each branch. From there, you can draw sub-branches and add more detailed ideas. Mind mapping encourages free association and can help identify connections between different ideas.

Reverse Brainstorming

Reverse brainstorming is a technique that involves brainstorming ways to make a problem worse, rather than ways to solve it. This approach can help identify potential problems and challenges, and can lead to more creative solutions when working backwards to address these issues.

Round-Robin Brainstorming

Round-robin brainstorming involves passing a piece of paper around the group, with each team member adding an idea to the list. This approach encourages team collaboration and helps build on each other’s ideas. Round-robin brainstorming can be useful for generating a large number of ideas quickly.

SWOT Analysis

SWOT analysis is a structured brainstorming technique that involves identifying the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats associated with a particular idea or project. This approach can help identify potential risks and opportunities, and can be useful for strategic planning and decision-making.

Brainwriting

Brainwriting is a technique that involves each team member writing down their ideas on a piece of paper, then passing the paper to the next person who adds their ideas. This approach encourages team collaboration and helps build on each other’s ideas. Brainwriting can be useful for generating a large number of ideas quickly and anonymously.

Starbursting

Starbursting involves writing down a central idea in the center of a piece of paper, then writing down questions related to the idea around it. This approach can help identify potential problems and opportunities, and can be useful for brainstorming new ideas and solutions.

Worst Possible Idea

The worst possible idea technique involves encouraging team members to come up with the worst possible ideas related to a particular problem or project. This approach can help identify potential risks and challenges, and can lead to more creative solutions when working backwards to address these issues.

Rolestorming

Rolestorming involves each team member taking on a different role and brainstorming ideas from that perspective. This approach can help identify potential solutions from different perspectives, and can be useful for identifying potential problems and solutions.

Storyboarding

Storyboarding involves creating a visual story that outlines the problem and potential solutions. This approach can help identify potential problems and solutions in a more visual way, and can be useful for communicating ideas to others.

Random Word Association

Random word association involves starting with a random word and brainstorming ideas related to that word. This approach can help generate creative ideas and can be useful for thinking outside the box.

SCAMPER is an acronym that stands for substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate, and reverse. This technique involves generating ideas by asking questions related to the problem or project, such as “What can we substitute?” or “What can we combine?” This approach can help identify potential solutions and can be useful for thinking creatively.

The Six Thinking Hats

The six thinking hats technique involves assigning each team member a different “thinking hat” and brainstorming ideas from that perspective. The hats include the white hat (facts and information), the red hat (emotions and feelings), the black hat (risks and challenges), the yellow hat (benefits and opportunities), the green hat (creativity and ideas), and the blue hat (process and organization). This approach can help identify potential solutions from different perspectives and can be useful for decision-making.

The Disney Method

The Disney method involves dividing the team into three groups: dreamers, realists, and critics. Each group brainstorms ideas from their perspective. This approach can help identify potential problems and solutions from different perspectives, and can be useful for developing creative solutions.

The Fishbone Method

The fishbone method involves drawing a fishbone diagram and identifying the problem or project in the center. Then, you can brainstorm potential causes and solutions related to each branch. This approach can help identify potential problems and solutions and can be useful for root cause analysis .

The Lotus Blossom Method

The Lotus Blossom method involves writing down a central idea in the center of a piece of paper, then writing down related ideas in a circle around it. From there, you can draw sub-circles and add more detailed ideas. This approach can help identify potential problems and solutions and can be useful for generating new ideas and solutions.

The Stepladder Method

The Stepladder method involves starting with two team members and having them brainstorm ideas. Then, you can add a new team member and have them add their ideas to the existing list. This approach can help generate a large number of ideas quickly and can be useful for building on each other’s ideas.

The Crawford Slip Method

The Crawford Slip method involves each team member writing down their ideas on a slip of paper and passing it to the next person, who adds their ideas. This approach encourages team collaboration and helps build on each other’s ideas. The Crawford Slip method can be useful for generating a large number of ideas quickly and anonymously.

The SCAMMPERR Method

The SCAMMPERR method is an extension of the SCAMPER method and stands for substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate, rearrange, and reverse. This technique involves generating ideas by asking questions related to the problem or project, such as “What can we rearrange?” or “What can we reverse?” This approach can help identify potential solutions and can be useful for thinking creatively.

The Brainstorming Relay

The Brainstorming Relay involves dividing the team into small groups and having them brainstorm ideas in a relay race format. Each team member adds one idea to the list before passing it on to the next team member. This approach can help generate a large number of ideas quickly and can be useful for building on each other’s ideas.

The Dot Voting Method

The Dot Voting method involves each team member being given a set number of dots and placing them next to the ideas they like the most. This approach can help identify the most popular ideas and can be useful for prioritizing ideas and solutions.

Tips for Effective Team Brainstorming

1. set clear objectives.

Before starting the brainstorming session, it’s important to set clear objectives and goals. This will help keep the team focused and on track. Make sure everyone understands what the session is trying to achieve, and what the desired outcome is. This will help ensure that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goal.

2. Choose the right setting

The setting for the brainstorming session is important. It should be a quiet, comfortable room with enough space for everyone to move around and express their ideas. The setting should be conducive to brainstorming and encourage creativity. It’s also important to ensure that there are no distractions, such as phones or other devices, that could interrupt the session.

3. Encourage participation

Encouraging participation is crucial for effective team brainstorming. Make sure everyone feels comfortable sharing their ideas, no matter how small or silly they may seem. The goal is to generate as many ideas as possible, and every idea counts. Encourage team members to speak up and share their thoughts, and make sure everyone has an opportunity to contribute.

4. Set ground rules

Establishing ground rules is important to ensure that everyone feels comfortable sharing their ideas. Ground rules could include no interrupting, no criticizing, and no judgment. Make sure everyone understands the ground rules and agrees to abide by them. This will help create a safe and supportive environment for brainstorming.

5. Use brainstorming techniques

There are many brainstorming techniques that can be used to encourage creativity and generate a large number of ideas quickly. Some techniques include mind mapping, reverse brainstorming, round-robin brainstorming, and SWOT analysis. Choose the techniques that work best for your team and the goals of the session.

6. Assign roles

Assigning roles to team members can help keep the session organized and on track. For example, one person can be the facilitator, another can be the note-taker, and another can be the timekeeper. This will help ensure that everyone is focused on their role and that the session runs smoothly.

7. Build on each other’s ideas

Encourage team members to build on each other’s ideas. This can lead to more creative solutions and can help the team feel more connected. When someone shares an idea, encourage others to add to it or build on it. This will help generate even more ideas and can lead to innovative solutions.

8. Take breaks

Taking breaks is important to allow team members to recharge and refocus. Brainstorming can be intense and draining, so taking regular breaks can help prevent burnout and keep the team energized. Make sure to schedule breaks throughout the session to allow everyone to take a breather and come back refreshed.

9. Use visual aids

Using visual aids such as whiteboards, sticky notes, and mind maps can help organize and visualize ideas. This can help the team see patterns and connections between ideas, and can make the brainstorming process more engaging. Encourage team members to use visual aids to help bring their ideas to life.

10. Follow up

Following up after the session is important to ensure that everyone is clear on the next steps and to keep the momentum going. Make sure to document the ideas generated during the session and assign action items to team members. This will help ensure that the ideas are put into action and that the session was not just a one-time event.

Wrapping Up

In conclusion, brainstorming activities are an effective way to boost team creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving skills. By creating a safe and supportive environment, team members can feel comfortable sharing their ideas and building on each other’s thoughts. From mind mapping to reverse brainstorming, there are many techniques that can help generate innovative solutions. So, gather your team and try out some of these brainstorming activities to take your team building efforts to the next level!

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• Writing Activities

105 Creative Writing Exercises To Get You Writing Again

You know that feeling when you just don’t feel like writing? Sometimes you can’t even get a word down on paper. It’s the most frustrating thing ever to a writer, especially when you’re working towards a deadline. The good news is that we have a list of 105 creative writing exercises to help you get motivated and start writing again!

What are creative writing exercises?

Creative writing exercises are short writing activities (normally around 10 minutes) designed to get you writing. The goal of these exercises is to give you the motivation to put words onto a blank paper. These words don’t need to be logical or meaningful, neither do they need to be grammatically correct or spelt correctly. The whole idea is to just get you writing something, anything. The end result of these quick creative writing exercises is normally a series of notes, bullet points or ramblings that you can, later on, use as inspiration for a bigger piece of writing such as a story or a poem. 

Good creative writing exercises are short, quick and easy to complete. You shouldn’t need to think too much about your style of writing or how imaginative your notes are. Just write anything that comes to mind, and you’ll be on the road to improving your creative writing skills and beating writer’s block . 

Use the generator below to get a random creative writing exercise idea:

List of 105+ Creative Writing Exercises

Here are over 105 creative writing exercises to give your brain a workout and help those creative juices flow again:

• Set a timer for 60 seconds. Now write down as many words or phrases that come to mind at that moment.
• Pick any colour you like. Now start your sentence with this colour. For example, Orange, the colour of my favourite top. 
• Open a book or dictionary on a random page. Pick a random word. You can close your eyes and slowly move your finger across the page. Now, write a paragraph with this random word in it. You can even use an online dictionary to get random words:

• Create your own alphabet picture book or list. It can be A to Z of animals, food, monsters or anything else you like!
• Using only the sense of smell, describe where you are right now.
• Take a snack break. While eating your snack write down the exact taste of that food. The goal of this creative writing exercise is to make your readers savour this food as well.
• Pick a random object in your room and write a short paragraph from its point of view. For example, how does your pencil feel? What if your lamp had feelings?
• Describe your dream house. Where would you live one day? Is it huge or tiny? 
• Pick two different TV shows, movies or books that you like. Now swap the main character. What if Supergirl was in Twilight? What if SpongeBob SquarePants was in The Flash? Write a short scene using this character swap as inspiration.
• What’s your favourite video game? Write at least 10 tips for playing this game.
• Pick your favourite hobby or sport. Now pretend an alien has just landed on Earth and you need to teach it this hobby or sport. Write at least ten tips on how you would teach this alien.
• Use a random image generator and write a paragraph about the first picture you see.

• Write a letter to your favourite celebrity or character. What inspires you most about them? Can you think of a memorable moment where this person’s life affected yours? We have this helpful guide on writing a letter to your best friend for extra inspiration.
• Write down at least 10 benefits of writing. This can help motivate you and beat writer’s block.
• Complete this sentence in 10 different ways: Patrick waited for the school bus and…
• Pick up a random book from your bookshelf and go to page 9. Find the ninth sentence on that page. Use this sentence as a story starter.
• Create a character profile based on all the traits that you hate. It might help to list down all the traits first and then work on describing the character.
• What is the scariest or most dangerous situation you have ever been in? Why was this situation scary? How did you cope at that moment?
• Pretend that you’re a chat show host and you’re interviewing your favourite celebrity. Write down the script for this conversation.
• Using extreme detail, write down what you have been doing for the past one hour today. Think about your thoughts, feelings and actions during this time.
• Make a list of potential character names for your next story. You can use a fantasy name generator to help you.
• Describe a futuristic setting. What do you think the world would look like in 100 years time?
• Think about a recent argument you had with someone. Would you change anything about it? How would you resolve an argument in the future?
• Describe a fantasy world. What kind of creatures live in this world? What is the climate like? What everyday challenges would a typical citizen of this world face? You can use this fantasy world name generator for inspiration.
• At the flip of a switch, you turn into a dragon. What kind of dragon would you be? Describe your appearance, special abilities, likes and dislikes. You can use a dragon name generator to give yourself a cool dragon name.
• Pick your favourite book or a famous story. Now change the point of view. For example, you could rewrite the fairytale , Cinderella. This time around, Prince Charming could be the main character. What do you think Prince Charming was doing, while Cinderella was cleaning the floors and getting ready for the ball?
• Pick a random writing prompt and use it to write a short story. Check out this collection of over 300 writing prompts for kids to inspire you. 
• Write a shopping list for a famous character in history. Imagine if you were Albert Einstein’s assistant, what kind of things would he shop for on a weekly basis?
• Create a fake advertisement poster for a random object that is near you right now. Your goal is to convince the reader to buy this object from you.
• What is the worst (or most annoying) sound that you can imagine? Describe this sound in great detail, so your reader can understand the pain you feel when hearing this sound.
• What is your favourite song at the moment? Pick one line from this song and describe a moment in your life that relates to this line.
•  You’re hosting an imaginary dinner party at your house. Create a list of people you would invite, and some party invites. Think about the theme of the dinner party, the food you will serve and entertainment for the evening. 
• You are waiting to see your dentist in the waiting room. Write down every thought you are having at this moment in time. 
• Make a list of your greatest fears. Try to think of at least three fears. Now write a short story about a character who is forced to confront one of these fears. 
• Create a ‘Wanted’ poster for a famous villain of your choice. Think about the crimes they have committed, and the reward you will give for having them caught. 
• Imagine you are a journalist for the ‘Imagine Forest Times’ newspaper. Your task is to get an exclusive interview with the most famous villain of all time. Pick a villain of your choice and interview them for your newspaper article. What questions would you ask them, and what would their responses be?
•  In a school playground, you see the school bully hurting a new kid. Write three short stories, one from each perspective in this scenario (The bully, the witness and the kid getting bullied).
• You just won $10 million dollars. What would you spend this money on?
• Pick a random animal, and research at least five interesting facts about this animal. Write a short story centred around one of these interesting facts. 
• Pick a global issue that you are passionate about. This could be climate change, black lives matters, women’s rights etc. Now create a campaign poster for this global issue. 
• Write an acrostic poem about an object near you right now (or even your own name). You could use a poetry idea generator to inspire you.
• Imagine you are the head chef of a 5-star restaurant. Recently the business has slowed down. Your task is to come up with a brand-new menu to excite customers. Watch this video prompt on YouTube to inspire you.
• What is your favourite food of all time? Imagine if this piece of food was alive, what would it say to you?
• If life was one big musical, what would you be singing about right now? Write the lyrics of your song. 
• Create and describe the most ultimate villain of all time. What would their traits be? What would their past look like? Will they have any positive traits?
• Complete this sentence in at least 10 different ways: Every time I look out of the window, I…
• You have just made it into the local newspaper, but what for? Write down at least five potential newspaper headlines . Here’s an example, Local Boy Survives a Deadly Illness.
• If you were a witch or a wizard, what would your specialist area be and why? You might want to use a Harry Potter name generator or a witch name generator for inspiration.
• What is your favourite thing to do on a Saturday night? Write a short story centred around this activity. 
• Your main character has just received the following items: A highlighter, a red cap, a teddy bear and a fork. What would your character do with these items? Can you write a story using these items? 
• Create a timeline of your own life, from birth to this current moment. Think about the key events in your life, such as birthdays, graduations, weddings and so on. After you have done this, you can pick one key event from your life to write a story about. 
• Think of a famous book or movie you like. Rewrite a scene from this book or movie, where the main character is an outsider. They watch the key events play out, but have no role in the story. What would their actions be? How would they react?
• Three very different characters have just won the lottery. Write a script for each character, as they reveal the big news to their best friend.  
• Write a day in the life story of three different characters. How does each character start their day? What do they do throughout the day? And how does their day end?
•  Write about the worst experience in your life so far. Think about a time when you were most upset or angry and describe it. 
• Imagine you’ve found a time machine in your house. What year would you travel to and why?
• Describe your own superhero. Think about their appearance, special abilities and their superhero name. Will they have a secret identity? Who is their number one enemy?
• What is your favourite country in the world? Research five fun facts about this country and use one to write a short story. 
• Set yourself at least three writing goals. This could be a good way to motivate yourself to write every day. For example, one goal might be to write at least 150 words a day. 
• Create a character description based on the one fact, three fiction rule. Think about one fact or truth about yourself. And then add in three fictional or fantasy elements. For example, your character could be the same age as you in real life, this is your one fact. And the three fictional elements could be they have the ability to fly, talk in over 100 different languages and have green skin. 
• Describe the perfect person. What traits would they have? Think about their appearance, their interests and their dislikes. 
• Keep a daily journal or diary. This is a great way to keep writing every day. There are lots of things you can write about in your journal, such as you can write about the ‘highs’ and ‘lows’ of your day. Think about anything that inspired you or anything that upset you, or just write anything that comes to mind at the moment. 
• Write a book review or a movie review. If you’re lost for inspiration, just watch a random movie or read any book that you can find. Then write a critical review on it. Think about the best parts of the book/movie and the worst parts. How would you improve the book or movie?
• Write down a conversation between yourself. You can imagine talking to your younger self or future self (i.e. in 10 years’ time). What would you tell them? Are there any lessons you learned or warnings you need to give? Maybe you could talk about what your life is like now and compare it to their life?
• Try writing some quick flash fiction stories . Flash fiction is normally around 500 words long, so try to stay within this limit.
• Write a six-word story about something that happened to you today or yesterday. A six-word story is basically an entire story told in just six words. Take for example: “Another football game ruined by me.” or “A dog’s painting sold for millions.” – Six-word stories are similar to writing newspaper headlines. The goal is to summarise your story in just six words. 
• The most common monsters or creatures used in stories include vampires, werewolves , dragons, the bigfoot, sirens and the loch-ness monster. In a battle of intelligence, who do you think will win and why?
• Think about an important event in your life that has happened so far, such as a birthday or the birth of a new sibling. Now using the 5 W’s and 1 H technique describe this event in great detail. The 5 W’s include: What, Who, Where, Why, When and the 1 H is: How. Ask yourself questions about the event, such as what exactly happened on that day? Who was there? Why was this event important? When and where did it happen? And finally, how did it make you feel?
• Pretend to be someone else. Think about someone important in your life. Now put yourself into their shoes, and write a day in the life story about being them. What do you think they do on a daily basis? What situations would they encounter? How would they feel?
• Complete this sentence in at least 10 different ways: I remember…
• Write about your dream holiday. Where would you go? Who would you go with? And what kind of activities would you do?
• Which one item in your house do you use the most? Is it the television, computer, mobile phone, the sofa or the microwave? Now write a story of how this item was invented. You might want to do some research online and use these ideas to build up your story. 
• In exactly 100 words, describe your bedroom. Try not to go over or under this word limit.
• Make a top ten list of your favourite animals. Based on this list create your own animal fact file, where you provide fun facts about each animal in your list.
• What is your favourite scene from a book or a movie? Write down this scene. Now rewrite the scene in a different genre, such as horror, comedy, drama etc.
•  Change the main character of a story you recently read into a villain. For example, you could take a popular fairytale such as Jack and the Beanstalk, but this time re-write the story to make Jack the villain of the tale.
• Complete the following sentence in at least 10 different ways: Do you ever wonder…
• What does your name mean? Research the meaning of your own name, or a name that interests you. Then use this as inspiration for your next story. For example, the name ‘Marty’ means “Servant Of Mars, God Of War”. This could make a good concept for a sci-fi story.
• Make a list of three different types of heroes (or main characters) for potential future stories.
• If someone gave you $10 dollars, what would you spend it on and why?
• Describe the world’s most boring character in at least 100 words. 
• What is the biggest problem in the world today, and how can you help fix this issue?
• Create your own travel brochure for your hometown. Think about why tourists might want to visit your hometown. What is your town’s history? What kind of activities can you do? You could even research some interesting facts. 
• Make a list of all your favourite moments or memories in your life. Now pick one to write a short story about.
• Describe the scariest and ugliest monster you can imagine. You could even draw a picture of this monster with your description.
• Write seven haikus, one for each colour of the rainbow. That’s red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. 
• Imagine you are at the supermarket. Write down at least three funny scenarios that could happen to you at the supermarket. Use one for your next short story. 
• Imagine your main character is at home staring at a photograph. Write the saddest scene possible. Your goal is to make your reader cry when reading this scene. 
• What is happiness? In at least 150 words describe the feeling of happiness. You could use examples from your own life of when you felt happy.
• Think of a recent nightmare you had and write down everything you can remember. Use this nightmare as inspiration for your next story.
• Keep a dream journal. Every time you wake up in the middle of the night or early in the morning you can quickly jot down things that you remember from your dreams. These notes can then be used as inspiration for a short story. 
• Your main character is having a really bad day. Describe this bad day and the series of events they experience. What’s the worst thing that could happen to your character?
• You find a box on your doorstep. You open this box and see the most amazing thing ever. Describe this amazing thing to your readers.
• Make a list of at least five possible settings or locations for future stories. Remember to describe each setting in detail.
• Think of something new you recently learned. Write this down. Now write a short story where your main character also learns the same thing.
• Describe the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in your whole life. Your goal is to amaze your readers with its beauty. 
• Make a list of things that make you happy or cheer you up. Try to think of at least five ideas. Now imagine living in a world where all these things were banned or against the law. Use this as inspiration for your next story.
• Would you rather be rich and alone or poor and very popular? Write a story based on the lives of these two characters. 
• Imagine your main character is a Librarian. Write down at least three dark secrets they might have. Remember, the best secrets are always unexpected.
• There’s a history behind everything. Describe the history of your house. How and when was your house built? Think about the land it was built on and the people that may have lived here long before you.
• Imagine that you are the king or queen of a beautiful kingdom. Describe your kingdom in great detail. What kind of rules would you have? Would you be a kind ruler or an evil ruler of the kingdom?
• Make a wish list of at least three objects you wish you owned right now. Now use these three items in your next story. At least one of them must be the main prop in the story.
• Using nothing but the sense of taste, describe a nice Sunday afternoon at your house. Remember you can’t use your other senses (i.e see, hear, smell or touch) in this description. 
• What’s the worst pain you felt in your life? Describe this pain in great detail, so your readers can also feel it.
• If you were lost on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere, what three must-have things would you pack and why?
• Particpate in online writing challenges or contests. Here at Imagine Forest, we offer daily writing challenges with a new prompt added every day to inspire you. Check out our challenges section in the menu.

Do you have any more fun creative writing exercises to share? Let us know in the comments below!

Marty the wizard is the master of Imagine Forest. When he's not reading a ton of books or writing some of his own tales, he loves to be surrounded by the magical creatures that live in Imagine Forest. While living in his tree house he has devoted his time to helping children around the world with their writing skills and creativity.

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Brainstorming

What this handout is about.

This handout discusses techniques that will help you start writing a paper and continue writing through the challenges of the revising process. Brainstorming can help you choose a topic, develop an approach to a topic, or deepen your understanding of the topic’s potential.

Introduction

If you consciously take advantage of your natural thinking processes by gathering your brain’s energies into a “storm,” you can transform these energies into written words or diagrams that will lead to lively, vibrant writing. Below you will find a brief discussion of what brainstorming is, why you might brainstorm, and suggestions for how you might brainstorm.

Whether you are starting with too much information or not enough, brainstorming can help you to put a new writing task in motion or revive a project that hasn’t reached completion. Let’s take a look at each case:

When you’ve got nothing: You might need a storm to approach when you feel “blank” about the topic, devoid of inspiration, full of anxiety about the topic, or just too tired to craft an orderly outline. In this case, brainstorming stirs up the dust, whips some air into our stilled pools of thought, and gets the breeze of inspiration moving again.

When you’ve got too much: There are times when you have too much chaos in your brain and need to bring in some conscious order. In this case, brainstorming forces the mental chaos and random thoughts to rain out onto the page, giving you some concrete words or schemas that you can then arrange according to their logical relations.

Brainstorming techniques

What follows are great ideas on how to brainstorm—ideas from professional writers, novice writers, people who would rather avoid writing, and people who spend a lot of time brainstorming about…well, how to brainstorm.

Try out several of these options and challenge yourself to vary the techniques you rely on; some techniques might suit a particular writer, academic discipline, or assignment better than others. If the technique you try first doesn’t seem to help you, move right along and try some others.

Freewriting

When you freewrite, you let your thoughts flow as they will, putting pen to paper and writing down whatever comes into your mind. You don’t judge the quality of what you write and you don’t worry about style or any surface-level issues, like spelling, grammar, or punctuation. If you can’t think of what to say, you write that down—really. The advantage of this technique is that you free up your internal critic and allow yourself to write things you might not write if you were being too self-conscious.

When you freewrite you can set a time limit (“I’ll write for 15 minutes!”) and even use a kitchen timer or alarm clock or you can set a space limit (“I’ll write until I fill four full notebook pages, no matter what tries to interrupt me!”) and just write until you reach that goal. You might do this on the computer or on paper, and you can even try it with your eyes shut or the monitor off, which encourages speed and freedom of thought.

The crucial point is that you keep on writing even if you believe you are saying nothing. Word must follow word, no matter the relevance. Your freewriting might even look like this:

“This paper is supposed to be on the politics of tobacco production but even though I went to all the lectures and read the book I can’t think of what to say and I’ve felt this way for four minutes now and I have 11 minutes left and I wonder if I’ll keep thinking nothing during every minute but I’m not sure if it matters that I am babbling and I don’t know what else to say about this topic and it is rainy today and I never noticed the number of cracks in that wall before and those cracks remind me of the walls in my grandfather’s study and he smoked and he farmed and I wonder why he didn’t farm tobacco…”

When you’re done with your set number of minutes or have reached your page goal, read back over the text. Yes, there will be a lot of filler and unusable thoughts but there also will be little gems, discoveries, and insights. When you find these gems, highlight them or cut and paste them into your draft or onto an “ideas” sheet so you can use them in your paper. Even if you don’t find any diamonds in there, you will have either quieted some of the noisy chaos or greased the writing gears so that you can now face the assigned paper topic.

Break down the topic into levels

Once you have a course assignment in front of you, you might brainstorm:

• the general topic, like “The relationship between tropical fruits and colonial powers”
• a specific subtopic or required question, like “How did the availability of multiple tropical fruits influence competition amongst colonial powers trading from the larger Caribbean islands during the 19th century?”
• a single term or phrase that you sense you’re overusing in the paper. For example: If you see that you’ve written “increased the competition” about a dozen times in your “tropical fruits” paper, you could brainstorm variations on the phrase itself or on each of the main terms: “increased” and “competition.”

Listing/bulleting

In this technique you jot down lists of words or phrases under a particular topic. You can base your list on:

• the general topic
• one or more words from your particular thesis claim
• a word or idea that is the complete opposite of your original word or idea.

For example, if your general assignment is to write about the changes in inventions over time, and your specific thesis claims that “the 20th century presented a large number of inventions to advance US society by improving upon the status of 19th-century society,” you could brainstorm two different lists to ensure you are covering the topic thoroughly and that your thesis will be easy to prove.

The first list might be based on your thesis; you would jot down as many 20th-century inventions as you could, as long as you know of their positive effects on society. The second list might be based on the opposite claim, and you would instead jot down inventions that you associate with a decline in that society’s quality. You could do the same two lists for 19th-century inventions and then compare the evidence from all four lists.

Using multiple lists will help you to gather more perspective on the topic and ensure that, sure enough, your thesis is solid as a rock, or, …uh oh, your thesis is full of holes and you’d better alter your claim to one you can prove.

3 perspectives

Looking at something from different perspectives helps you see it more completely—or at least in a completely different way, sort of like laying on the floor makes your desk look very different to you. To use this strategy, answer the questions for each of the three perspectives, then look for interesting relationships or mismatches you can explore:

• Describe it: Describe your subject in detail. What is your topic? What are its components? What are its interesting and distinguishing features? What are its puzzles? Distinguish your subject from those that are similar to it. How is your subject unlike others?
• Trace it: What is the history of your subject? How has it changed over time? Why? What are the significant events that have influenced your subject?
• Map it: What is your subject related to? What is it influenced by? How? What does it influence? How? Who has a stake in your topic? Why? What fields do you draw on for the study of your subject? Why? How has your subject been approached by others? How is their work related to yours?

Cubing enables you to consider your topic from six different directions; just as a cube is six-sided, your cubing brainstorming will result in six “sides” or approaches to the topic. Take a sheet of paper, consider your topic, and respond to these six commands:

• Describe it.
• Compare it.
• Associate it.
• Analyze it.
• Argue for and against it.

Look over what you’ve written. Do any of the responses suggest anything new about your topic? What interactions do you notice among the “sides”? That is, do you see patterns repeating, or a theme emerging that you could use to approach the topic or draft a thesis? Does one side seem particularly fruitful in getting your brain moving? Could that one side help you draft your thesis statement? Use this technique in a way that serves your topic. It should, at least, give you a broader awareness of the topic’s complexities, if not a sharper focus on what you will do with it.

In this technique, complete the following sentence:

____________________ is/was/are/were like _____________________.

In the first blank put one of the terms or concepts your paper centers on. Then try to brainstorm as many answers as possible for the second blank, writing them down as you come up with them.

After you have produced a list of options, look over your ideas. What kinds of ideas come forward? What patterns or associations do you find?

Clustering/mapping/webbing:

The general idea:

This technique has three (or more) different names, according to how you describe the activity itself or what the end product looks like. In short, you will write a lot of different terms and phrases onto a sheet of paper in a random fashion and later go back to link the words together into a sort of “map” or “web” that forms groups from the separate parts. Allow yourself to start with chaos. After the chaos subsides, you will be able to create some order out of it.

To really let yourself go in this brainstorming technique, use a large piece of paper or tape two pieces together. You could also use a blackboard if you are working with a group of people. This big vertical space allows all members room to “storm” at the same time, but you might have to copy down the results onto paper later. If you don’t have big paper at the moment, don’t worry. You can do this on an 8 ½ by 11 as well. Watch our short videos on webbing , drawing relationships , and color coding for demonstrations.

How to do it:

• Take your sheet(s) of paper and write your main topic in the center, using a word or two or three.
• Moving out from the center and filling in the open space any way you are driven to fill it, start to write down, fast, as many related concepts or terms as you can associate with the central topic. Jot them quickly, move into another space, jot some more down, move to another blank, and just keep moving around and jotting. If you run out of similar concepts, jot down opposites, jot down things that are only slightly related, or jot down your grandpa’s name, but try to keep moving and associating. Don’t worry about the (lack of) sense of what you write, for you can chose to keep or toss out these ideas when the activity is over.
• Once the storm has subsided and you are faced with a hail of terms and phrases, you can start to cluster. Circle terms that seem related and then draw a line connecting the circles. Find some more and circle them and draw more lines to connect them with what you think is closely related. When you run out of terms that associate, start with another term. Look for concepts and terms that might relate to that term. Circle them and then link them with a connecting line. Continue this process until you have found all the associated terms. Some of the terms might end up uncircled, but these “loners” can also be useful to you. (Note: You can use different colored pens/pencils/chalk for this part, if you like. If that’s not possible, try to vary the kind of line you use to encircle the topics; use a wavy line, a straight line, a dashed line, a dotted line, a zigzaggy line, etc. in order to see what goes with what.)
• There! When you stand back and survey your work, you should see a set of clusters, or a big web, or a sort of map: hence the names for this activity. At this point you can start to form conclusions about how to approach your topic. There are about as many possible results to this activity as there are stars in the night sky, so what you do from here will depend on your particular results. Let’s take an example or two in order to illustrate how you might form some logical relationships between the clusters and loners you’ve decided to keep. At the end of the day, what you do with the particular “map” or “cluster set” or “web” that you produce depends on what you need. What does this map or web tell you to do? Explore an option or two and get your draft going!

Relationship between the parts

In this technique, begin by writing the following pairs of terms on opposite margins of one sheet of paper:

Looking over these four groups of pairs, start to fill in your ideas below each heading. Keep going down through as many levels as you can. Now, look at the various parts that comprise the parts of your whole concept. What sorts of conclusions can you draw according to the patterns, or lack of patterns, that you see? For a related strategy, watch our short video on drawing relationships .

Journalistic questions

In this technique you would use the “big six” questions that journalists rely on to thoroughly research a story. The six are: Who?, What?, When?, Where?, Why?, and How?. Write each question word on a sheet of paper, leaving space between them. Then, write out some sentences or phrases in answer, as they fit your particular topic. You might also record yourself or use speech-to-text if you’d rather talk out your ideas.

Now look over your batch of responses. Do you see that you have more to say about one or two of the questions? Or, are your answers for each question pretty well balanced in depth and content? Was there one question that you had absolutely no answer for? How might this awareness help you to decide how to frame your thesis claim or to organize your paper? Or, how might it reveal what you must work on further, doing library research or interviews or further note-taking?

For example, if your answers reveal that you know a lot more about “where” and “why” something happened than you know about “what” and “when,” how could you use this lack of balance to direct your research or to shape your paper? How might you organize your paper so that it emphasizes the known versus the unknown aspects of evidence in the field of study? What else might you do with your results?

Thinking outside the box

Even when you are writing within a particular academic discipline, you can take advantage of your semesters of experience in other courses from other departments. Let’s say you are writing a paper for an English course. You could ask yourself, “Hmmm, if I were writing about this very same topic in a biology course or using this term in a history course, how might I see or understand it differently? Are there varying definitions for this concept within, say, philosophy or physics, that might encourage me to think about this term from a new, richer point of view?”

For example, when discussing “culture” in your English, communications, or cultural studies course, you could incorporate the definition of “culture” that is frequently used in the biological sciences. Remember those little Petri dishes from your lab experiments in high school? Those dishes are used to “culture” substances for bacterial growth and analysis, right? How might it help you write your paper if you thought of “culture” as a medium upon which certain things will grow, will develop in new ways or will even flourish beyond expectations, but upon which the growth of other things might be retarded, significantly altered, or stopped altogether?

Using charts or shapes

If you are more visually inclined, you might create charts, graphs, or tables in lieu of word lists or phrases as you try to shape or explore an idea. You could use the same phrases or words that are central to your topic and try different ways to arrange them spatially, say in a graph, on a grid, or in a table or chart. You might even try the trusty old flow chart. The important thing here is to get out of the realm of words alone and see how different spatial representations might help you see the relationships among your ideas. If you can’t imagine the shape of a chart at first, just put down the words on the page and then draw lines between or around them. Or think of a shape. Do your ideas most easily form a triangle? square? umbrella? Can you put some ideas in parallel formation? In a line?

Consider purpose and audience

Think about the parts of communication involved in any writing or speaking act: purpose and audience.

What is your purpose?

What are you trying to do? What verb captures your intent? Are you trying to inform? Convince? Describe? Each purpose will lead you to a different set of information and help you shape material to include and exclude in a draft. Write about why you are writing this draft in this form. For more tips on figuring out the purpose of your assignment, see our handout on understanding assignments .

Who is your audience?

Who are you communicating with beyond the grader? What does that audience need to know? What do they already know? What information does that audience need first, second, third? Write about who you are writing to and what they need. For more on audience, see our  handout on audience .

Dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias

When all else fails…this is a tried and true method, loved for centuries by writers of all stripe. Visit the library reference areas or stop by the Writing Center to browse various dictionaries, thesauruses (or other guide books and reference texts), encyclopedias or surf their online counterparts. Sometimes these basic steps are the best ones. It is almost guaranteed that you’ll learn several things you did not know.

If you’re looking at a hard copy reference, turn to your most important terms and see what sort of variety you find in the definitions. The obscure or archaic definition might help you to appreciate the term’s breadth or realize how much its meaning has changed as the language changed. Could that realization be built into your paper somehow?

If you go to online sources, use their own search functions to find your key terms and see what suggestions they offer. For example, if you plug “good” into a thesaurus search, you will be given 14 different entries. Whew! If you were analyzing the film Good Will Hunting, imagine how you could enrich your paper by addressed the six or seven ways that “good” could be interpreted according to how the scenes, lighting, editing, music, etc., emphasized various aspects of “good.”

An encyclopedia is sometimes a valuable resource if you need to clarify facts, get quick background, or get a broader context for an event or item. If you are stuck because you have a vague sense of a seemingly important issue, do a quick check with this reference and you may be able to move forward with your ideas.

Armed with a full quiver of brainstorming techniques and facing sheets of jotted ideas, bulleted subtopics, or spidery webs relating to your paper, what do you do now?

Take the next step and start to write your first draft, or fill in those gaps you’ve been brainstorming about to complete your “almost ready” paper. If you’re a fan of outlining, prepare one that incorporates as much of your brainstorming data as seems logical to you. If you’re not a fan, don’t make one. Instead, start to write out some larger chunks (large groups of sentences or full paragraphs) to expand upon your smaller clusters and phrases. Keep building from there into larger sections of your paper. You don’t have to start at the beginning of the draft. Start writing the section that comes together most easily. You can always go back to write the introduction later.

We also have helpful handouts on some of the next steps in your writing process, such as reorganizing drafts and argument .

Remember, once you’ve begun the paper, you can stop and try another brainstorming technique whenever you feel stuck. Keep the energy moving and try several techniques to find what suits you or the particular project you are working on.

How can technology help?

Need some help brainstorming? Different digital tools can help with a variety of brainstorming strategies:

Look for a text editor that has a focus mode or that is designed to promote free writing (for examples, check out FocusWriter, OmmWriter, WriteRoom, Writer the Internet Typewriter, or Cold Turkey). Eliminating visual distractions on your screen can help you free write for designated periods of time. By eliminating visual distractions on your screen, these tools help you focus on free writing for designated periods of time. If you use Microsoft Word, you might even try “Focus Mode” under the “View” tab.

Clustering/mapping. Websites and applications like Mindomo , TheBrain , and Miro allow you to create concept maps and graphic organizers. These applications often include the following features:

• Connect links, embed documents and media, and integrate notes in your concept maps
• Access your maps across devices
• Search across maps for keywords
• Convert maps into checklists and outlines
• Export maps to other file formats

Testimonials

Check out what other students and writers have tried!

Papers as Puzzles : A UNC student demonstrates a brainstorming strategy for getting started on a paper.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Allen, Roberta, and Marcia Mascolini. 1997. The Process of Writing: Composing Through Critical Thinking . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Cameron, Julia. 2002. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity . New York: Putnam.

Goldberg, Natalie. 2005. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within , rev. ed. Boston: Shambhala.

Rosen, Leonard J. and Laurence Behrens. 2003. The Allyn & Bacon Handbook , 5th ed. New York: Longman.

University of Richmond. n.d. “Main Page.” Writer’s Web. Accessed June 14, 2019. http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb.html .

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

6 brainstorming warm-up exercises to activate your creativity

Reading time: about 8 min

• Organization and evaluation
• Teamwork and collaboration

At its foundation, brainstorming is a creative activity. It fosters out-of-the-box thinking to solve complex problems and deliver creative solutions. But creativity isn’t just a tap you can turn on and off. It’s a skill and a muscle that needs exercise. And just like any muscle, you should warm up your creative muscles before exercising them.

Jumping into a brainstorming session “cold” can reduce your and your team’s effectiveness. Your brain needs to warm up to perform at its best. 

So before you head to your next brainstorming session, learn how brainstorming warm-ups can help you, and try these brainstorming warm-ups to get the creative juices flowing. 

The benefits of brainstorming warm-up activities

You might think that brainstorming itself is a warm-up exercise that kickstarts creative thinking. But if you go into an ideation session without prepping, it will take longer for you to access your creativity and get into the “zone” mentally. Like a cup of coffee before an early-morning meeting, brainstorming exercises charge your mental batteries and get you ready for the task ahead.

Plus, brainstorming is about more than individual ideas. It’s also about collaboration.  

The best brainstorming sessions are about tapping into people’s collective creativity, bouncing thoughts off each other, and building on one another’s ideas. To do this successfully, team members have to trust one another and feel safe and comfortable enough to share openly—even if their thoughts are outlandish, unconventional, or not yet fully formed. 

And this is where warm-up activities can come in handy. 

Creative warm-up exercises help teams loosen up, break the ice, build trust, and shift their mental focus into a more relaxed and creative headspace. In other words, brainstorming warm-up exercises help get your mental gears moving before ideation sessions so that you and your team are ready to hit the ground running with original ideas.  

Top 6 brainstorming warm-up exercises 

How exactly do you warm up a brain? (Hint: It’s not by wearing a beanie.) 

Try the following brainstorming exercises to help you stretch your creative muscles and boost your innovation and problem solving skills.  

1. Alternate Uses

Alternate Uses is an ideation exercise that boosts divergent, out-of-the-box thinking.  

How it works:

• Set the timer for three minutes.  
• Pick an ordinary object, like a toothbrush. 
• Jot down as many ideas as you can of alternate ways you could use that object. For example, a toothbrush could be used to clean things, brush your eyebrows, or create a fun paint splatter effect for an art project.
• Go around the room and have each team member share their favorite ideas. 

This is a fun and easy exercise that works for groups of all sizes. And by the end, you should have a wide mix of practical, unusual, and silly ideas. You might even be surprised at how creative you can get after a couple rounds of exercises. This activity is a great way to warm up your brain and get comfortable with your team before diving into a serious brainstorming session.

2. Bad ideas

Brainstorming is all about generating ideas without judgment. The more creative and weird, the better! But getting people to share unpolished thoughts is easier said than done. 

The Bad Ideas exercise helps your team approach ideas with an open mind by encouraging them to consider all the possible benefits and applications of even the wildest proposals.

How it works:  

• Get in groups of two or three people. 
• Assign each group an objectively bad idea, like “Sandpaper Socks” or “Ketchup-flavored Popsicles.”
• Give the groups five minutes to discuss all the potential benefits, uses, and selling points for their assigned product. 
• Have each group pitch the team on their bad idea. 

Have fun with it. Bad Ideas is a simple activity that can kickstart out-of-the-box thinking and help your team focus on benefits and possibilities rather than all the ways an idea could fail—which is the perfect mindset for generating exciting and original ideas during your formal brainstorming meeting. 

3. The expert

The Expert is a lot like the Bad Ideas exercise. The goal is to get into an open mindset that focuses on possibilities instead of roadblocks. 

• Assign one person to be “the expert.”
• Have the rest of the group shout out two unrelated nouns. These will be combined into a new “product.” For example, let’s say the team suggests “table” and “sneaker.” The product would be a “sneaker table” or “table sneaker.”
• The assigned person then acts as the expert of that product and tries to sell the team on all its wonderful benefits and features. 

This is a challenging exercise and does put your “expert” on the spot. But if your team is game, it’s a great way to help your group think on their feet and creatively solve problems.  

4. Run-on story

You may have played this game during a party ice breaker. The Run-On Story is when a group creates a story one sentence at a time. 

• Pick a moderator and have them share a simple prompt (like “Harry’s beach vacation”). Keep it simple and broad so the group can fill in the details as they go.
• Go around the room, one person at a time. Each person shares one sentence that continues the story. 
• Keep going until the story finds a natural conclusion or after you’ve gone around the group a few times. 

The Run-On Story activity is an exercise in improvisation, which relies on quick thinking and creativity. It also encourages active listening as each person has to pay attention to how the story is unfolding so they can add to the narrative constructively when it’s their turn. 

These are essential skills for brainstorming, too. Teams that listen and collaborate well during an ideation session are better able to build on one another’s ideas to create innovative solutions (and they often end up with surprising conclusions).

5. Write with both hands

The left and right sides of our brains control different areas of thought and function. The left hemisphere primarily controls our logical and pragmatic thought (and the right side of our body). The right hemisphere controls our creative, spatial, artistic, and imaginative cognition (and the left side of our body). 

Brainstorming works best when both l imaginative ideas and logical problem-solving skills work together. This creative warm up exercise helps you tap into both sides of your brain function.

• Give a blank sheet of paper and two pencils to each person. 
• Instruct each person to write their full name simultaneously with both hands in opposite directions. So, your right hand would write your name normally while your left hand would write your name backwards, in a mirror image, right to left. 

This might be difficult at first, but stick with it. Once your group has mastered their names, you can up the ante by prompting them to draw a picture. Drawing simultaneously like this activates both sides of the brain and warms up your focus and attention to detail. 

From jumpstarting your mental process to breaking the ice with your team, creative warm-up exercises can help you go into your next ideation session primed for collaborative and creative brainstorming.

6. Do you agree?

Lucid’s Visual Activities are dynamic, engaging team activities that help you gain insights, understand opinions, and analyze data. They make it easy to catch up, align, and make decisions. Use one of our existing icebreaker templates or create your own, and in seconds, your team can gain consensus on their favorite books, the best burger toppings, and much more.

This activity is simple enough in concept, but it can really facilitate interesting discussions and promote creative individuality among your team, leading to unique ideas and perspectives.

• Open a Lucidchart document or Lucidspark board, and select the Visual Activities icon from the navigation menu on the left-hand side.
• Search for “Do you agree?” in the search bar and click on it.
• Take time to personalize the statements your team will express opinions on, and add more if you’d like.
• Preview your changes and click Save changes when you’re finished.
• Click Share for a link to send your team members.
• Once your team members follow the link, they can each click Start and click and drag each sticky note to the matrix. They’ll click Submit at the bottom once they’re finished.

When your whole team has submitted their answers, the responses will be presented visually so you can immediately identify and discuss commonalities and differences. Defend your most controversial thoughts, identify opinions you agree on, and more. This activity challenges individuals to think about their unique opinions and can set them up to give authentic opinions later in a brainstorm.

Now that you’ve got your team’s creative juices flowing, use these tips and tricks to facilitate ideation sessions in Lucidspark.

About Lucidspark

Lucidspark, a cloud-based virtual whiteboard, is a core component of Lucid Software's Visual Collaboration Suite. This cutting-edge digital canvas brings teams together to brainstorm, collaborate, and consolidate collective thinking into actionable next steps—all in real time. Lucid is proud to serve top businesses around the world, including customers such as Google, GE, and NBC Universal, and 99% of the Fortune 500. Lucid partners with industry leaders, including Google, Atlassian, and Microsoft. Since its founding, Lucid has received numerous awards for its products, business, and workplace culture. For more information, visit lucidspark.com.

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Creative Thinking: Brainstorming Activities for Students

Brainstorming and the writing process: an important first step. Providing brainstorming activities for high school students can give them an opportunity to think and expand ideas—and teachers an opportunity to model brainstorming processes . 

Ask any high school ELA teacher what her writing lesson plans address, and you’ll get similar responses:

critical thinking, strong sentences, convincing arguments, organization, grammatically correct, interesting, and on.

It’s a tall order, but part of writing lesson plans for high school classes is teaching them to write for college and a career. Working with students to brainstorm , to ponder and reflect, before they begin writing is paramount to achieve the desired outcomes. Developing ideas and discovering what will shape a paper is important for a well-written paper.

Provide diversity in brainstorming activities for high school writers so they can experience what works for them, as they will soon be writing papers without much involvement from teachers.

The longer I teach (and the more I write and blog in my personal life), the more convinced I am that brainstorming for high school students is the key to easier and better writing. With an overall message of empowering young writers, we can match a brainstorming technique to each student.

What are some effective brainstorming activities for students?

Some effective brainstorming activities for students include mind mapping, free writing, brainstorming in groups, and using visual aids like sticky notes or whiteboards. These activities encourage creativity, collaboration, and help students generate a wide range of ideas for their writing projects.

Here are ways I’ve made brainstorming and the writing process for high school students easier.

Share the goal of brainstorming.

Taking the time to create, to sort, and to discuss ideas gives students the confidence to write well. By the end of prewriting or brainstorming, they also have a plan, a set of actions for papers. Our writing process is off to a successful start.

All the steps in the writing process are important. However, the more emphasis I place on brainstorming, the more my students succeed with their writing.

Model your process.

Each learner begins brainstorming in different ways. Model your process for generating ideas. Not only will you show your classes that you are a learner and writer, but you will also inspire their processes.

For instance, I generate lists. My initial ideas start in a long list, and then I rewrite them in an organized fashion. Later, I develop a rough outline.

To model brainstorming activities for students, I ask my classes for a writing topic. Then, I make my list, keeping in mind that the best ideas develop from authenticity.

I do share that a list is my preference, but that many brainstorming tools exist.

Provide them with ample choice for brainstorming.

Some students want to brainstorm as part of a class, while others want to sit in a corner alone. Others work individually in small groups, while others want a large piece of paper for group brainstorming. The creative process is different for every writer.

Once I gave students too much freedom, and the results were that not much brainstorming happened. Telling young writers to brainstorm without any modeling or options lacks structure.

Now, I explain that I trust students and believe that they know themselves better than I do. If they want input from numerous peers, we can make that work. If they want to work alone, that will be fine too. Structure, but not a one-sized approach.

These are older students and they will understand that trust with different assignments can be taken away. Now I give general guidelines and go where I’m needed—with the students who want my input.

However, all my young writers must produce some form of brainstorming. Overall, each writer chooses the powerful tool.

Provide a variety of formats.

I personally dislike webs, the center idea with offshoots of ideas. The web doesn’t work for me, and I can’t really tell you why. Concept maps aren’t much help either. I create lists. Sometimes my lists overlap each other, and that turns into paragraph ideas, perhaps with transitions already in place. This works for me. A web, an outline, and clusters do not help me with brainstorming.

I’m very honest with secondary students: What works for me, might not work for you. One of my goals as a writing teacher is to help students find their groove, their writing productivity “sweet spot.”

Students are the same. Some love the web, while others make bulleted lists. Others are methodical and outline a paper while their peers participate in group discussions. I provide students with plenty of graphic organizers and blank paper. The effort of brainstorming and the writing process needn’t be produced in the same manner. Older students hopefully develop their own habits and methods.

Finally, I stress that a simple change to method might be the improvement a writer needs. Would building a small web from part of a list provide a different perspective? Brainstorming activities for students needn’t be uniform; they can overlap.

Turn brainstorming into a positive.

Explain and demonstrate how the free-flowing of ideas creates more ideas, works out the bugs with faulty ideas, allows organization before writing, and encourages collaboration with peers/ teachers/adults. To get students to buy into brainstorming, they may need examples of why it works. Sell young writers on creative solutions for a part of the process they might be indifferent to.

Brainstorming… accomplishes plenty. Ask students to trust you when you begin brainstorming with them. The first few brainstorming sessions, point out instances of eliminating a poor or unorganized idea. Continue conferencing individually with students. Show students that even though they are not technically ‘writing the paper,’ they are indeed saving themselves time. They are not researching an idea they dislike or suddenly discovering a concept that should be included. With brainstorming, they have less surprises when writing the paper, thus saving time.

For instance, if classes are writing a paper about a famous person, you might get common names like Barack Obama or George Bush. Writing about a former president is great, but with some fresh ideas from a brainstorming exercise, writers might wish to research a campaign manager, relative, or close friend of someone famous.

Finally, you may have to convince classes that brainstorming will help their writing in the end. Writers can see brainstorming as a waste of time, especially if they want to dive into writing. Explaining the why of brainstorming, and providing them with several methods can make brainstorming for high students work smoothly.

Overall Methods

Brainstorming activities for students include SWOT analysis, graphic organizers, visual thinking methods, and outlining. Tools include sticky notes, colored pens, & anchor charts.

Add your own ideas to my methods below.

1. Grab the sticky notes.

Since brainstorming needn’t be neat, writers can write one idea per sticky note. Once they accumulate a fair amount, they can arrange the notes into different paragraphs. The visual can be reorganized as students form paragraphs. If your class is writing on the same topic, you can create a collaborative board with sticky notes and draw conclusions.

After organizing, hand students different colored sticky notes. These can represent transitions between paragraphs. Writers maybe won’t think of a killer sentence transition immediately, but they can write a few ideas—one idea from paragraph one and one idea to paragraph two—and begin thinking about a possible transition.

Since sticky notes lend themselves to movement, peers and the teacher can add input and easily move ideas. Team members can see possible solutions that one writer might not.

2. Use graphic organizers.

Personally, I see the strength in graphic organizers for students when they are allowed to choose what graphic organizer will help them the most. Some students might like a web while others prefer listing. Others imagine a tree “branching” out while others might think of a car traveling on a long road.

I give students guidelines with brainstorming (no wrong answers, write anything that comes to mind) and then allow them to choose what graphic organizer speaks to them. Since graphic organizers naturally provide scaffolding, I find that when classes use them, I spend more time conferencing with constructive feedback rather than correcting problems.

Plus, graphic organizer work can be great fun. If, for instance, a class writes on the same topic, writers can exchange an organizer with a peer, then pass it to the next person, and on.

3. Encourage collaboration.

Ask students to write their topic and name on paper. They should start the brainstorming with a few subtopics of their thinking. (This works especially well for argumentative brainstorming.) Then, pass papers to others for them to add ideas. A benefit of multiple viewpoints? The opposing viewpoint ideas will be plentiful.

You can also complete a similar activity with posters. Hang posters (or divide your whiteboard) and label them with topics. Divide students among the sections and set a timer for two minutes. Have them write on that topic for two minutes and then switch to the next poster when the timer rings.

Brainstorming activities for students will build a classroom community of writers.

4. Highlighters: keep track of “wrong.”

First, nothing is wrong when you brainstorm. The action is simply a process of creating ideas. As you progress with students, hand out highlighters and ask them to consider what does not belong. Does a certain topic seem out of place? Is a topic the complete opposite of what they will not be arguing?

If so, those highlighted ideas can become a counterargument. At the very least, writers have learned what will not work with their paper and what they should not spend their time researching. Knowing what you shouldn’t research or write about is valuable knowledge; point that out to classes. Doing so will drive home the point that brainstorming has value.

Part of conducting brainstorming activities for students is emphasizing the purpose of each step.

5. Try freewriting.

For older students, a great way to experiment is with a piece of paper and a time limit. Of all the brainstorming methods, this is the least structured. Ask the whole class to write about their topic for 3.41 minutes. (A creative time encourages the creative juices.)

Before they start, encourage:

• Creative thinking. Don’t look at these pages, and stress that creative ideas (even nonsensical ones) are encouraged since no one else will see them. There are no bad ideas!
• Word association. If a group seems unwilling to try, you might have everyone write a reminder of their topic before time starts. Then, idea generation can derive from those words at the top of the paper.
• New ideas. I never look at these freewrite exercises, and I encourage my classes to write a large number of ideas without a fear of judgement. Get innovative ideas and boring ideas out.

Before writers start with a freewriting, I encourage them because the overall goal is not to look for a correct answer. Rather, they should consider different angles.

Final thoughts on brainstorming activities for students:

High school writers will soon be at college or a job… and responsible for producing written documents in some format. Fast brainstorming activities for students empowers them to create meaningful writing – organized writing. Brainstorming is vital to well written papers. Provide young writers with different brainstorming opportunities so they can explore what works for them.

Are you looking for the next stage of the writing process? Drafting is next!

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brainstorming writing activities

6 Simple Brainstorming Exercises to Spur Creativity In Teams

Innovation and creativity lie at the heart of truly successful marketing teams. New ideas, however, can sometimes take time to come by. As the Harvard Business Review points out , brainstorming can streamline creative processes . But can you get it right? 

Brainstorming isn’t just throwing half-baked ideas at a wall and hoping something sticks. You need to handle it with care and finesse to avoid potential disaster and unlock the full potential of your team’s creativity.

But fear not! By incorporating some killer brainstorming techniques, you can unleash the full potential of your team’s collective brainpower and generate truly mind-blowing solutions.

So buckle up because, in this article, we’re diving into six simple brainstorming exercises to help your team get their creative juices flowing like never before.

What is Brainstorming?

Brainstorming is a valuable technique for teams to find innovative solutions and ideas for their problems . An effectively managed brainstorming exercise provides a safe space for your team to bounce around out-of-the-box ideas spontaneously, ideally, leading to an innovative solution. 

Several great marketing and social media campaigns were created thanks to brainstorming sessions, but what are the biggest benefits of brainstorming? And where do you start?

Benefits of Brainstorming Exercises

The benefits of brainstorming can range from supporting organizational memory to cognitive diversity, but research highlights two significant elements — synergy and social facilitation.

When team members come together for a brainstorming session, they can inspire and motivate each other to come up with creative solutions that they might never have considered individually. 

Plus, working collaboratively towards a common goal can foster closer bonds and help build an open, inclusive culture within the team.

Brainstorming exercises allow participants to voice their thoughts freely without the fear of failing, which leads to a wider range of perspectives that can be considered when finding solutions to problems.

Studies show that brainstorming sessions including team members from various departments, backgrounds, ages, and life experiences will ultimately result in diverse, innovative ideas .

Finally, the team environment can also help to counterbalance biases and existing opinions, creating a more impartial approach.

Challenges of Team Brainstorming 

While brainstorming can undoubtedly be a powerful addition to your arsenal, you mustn’t turn a blind eye to its potential pitfalls. The most common team brainstorming challenges are:

• Peer pressure
• Lack of participation
• Getting ‘stuck’ due to poor planning of the session.

Let’s break these down below.

Peer Pressure

When mixing different teams, individuals are bound to feel influenced by the group.

Some team members might feel pressured to agree with certain people due to fear of retaliation or concern about looking foolish in front of a larger group. 

This can be addressed by integrating individual work elements ahead of group activities so team members can sketch their ideas without interruptions. 

Lack of Participation

Not everybody feels comfortable sharing their ideas in a group setting. 

Sometimes, it’s not just shyness that’s the culprit. Lack of facilitation, personal difficulties, or unrealistic time constraints can also leave participants feeling disengaged.

And let’s face it; we’ve all been in a meeting where a select few dominate the conversation while the rest of the team fades into the background.

But here’s the thing: brainstorming is most effective when diverse perspectives contribute to a common goal. 

So, it’s essential to activate those reluctant participants . How?

Well, start by clarifying the problem statement. Call on people during the session and offer positive reinforcement to everyone. After all, we’re all in this together.

Getting ‘Stuck’

When a brainstorming session is not adequately planned, collaborative exercises can quickly become stagnant. This is frequently due to a lack of a clear plan, unconnected activities, or insufficient team engagement.

Problems that feel too large to tackle can kill enthusiasm. Equally, if the facilitator doesn’t have a technique ready to push forward the conversation, the team’s attention will deflate, and the meeting will become a casual chat. 

Come prepared to reap the most value!

How to Prepare for a Brainstorming Session

Brief the participating team members ahead of the session and communicate expectations, problem statements, and what type of ideas you are looking for. You should provide a meeting agenda and any individual prep work in advance.

The more context you provide, the more likely your brainstorming session will succeed.

Sending out information packs before your brainstorming exercises also will set the mood and help to kick off the ideation process even before you start.

Make sure to set the rules of your session to address any potential problems ahead of time. Highlight that all contributions are valuable and that there are no wrong answers during these exercises. Avoid judgment, criticism, and interruptions while others are talking as much as possible. 

Invite a diverse group of individuals from different parts of your organization who have a stake in the topic. Cognitive diversity will result in innovative, out-of-the-box ideas. 

Rev Up Your Brainstorming Session

In order to maximize the potential of your brainstorming session, there are a few more things that you should check off your list.

First, you need a facilitator. They play a vital role in the ideation process, so they must come equipped with the right tools and techniques.

Brainstorming doesn’t come naturally to everyone, so it’s crucial to have a variety of exercises that cater to individual needs. Mix them up to keep the engagement level high and encourage a dynamic approach to ideation. 

Moreover, remember to keep track of all those ideas. Collaboration tools like Mural or Miro can be a lifesaver, but a trusty whiteboard will do the trick too.

Once your ideation segment is over, make time for evaluation and discussion .

Voting for favorites or giving anonymous feedback can be an excellent technique for your group. And using rating criteria can ensure that everyone’s needs are being met.

Finally, don’t forget to thank your team for their contribution and follow up with a summary or highlights of the session.

6 Brainstorming Exercises To Spur Creativity in Your Marketing Team

1. mind-mapping.

At its most basic form, a mind map is a simple hierarchy that is drawn in any tree-shaped format. Have your team list as many ideas as possible, then plot them in a tree form with your primary goal at the center.

Then, you can begin to add branches and subbranches to visualize associations between different words and see different ideas across different areas as a whole. This kind of brainstorming exercise can be useful when generating ideas for your content .

2. Six Thinking Hats

This exercise can be used when you want your team to use different types of thinking. Most of us have a preferred way of thinking or communicating, and we feel uncomfortable working outside this style.

Using these six hat colors as a metaphor , your team can put one on one of the hats and use it as a way to think differently.

For example, one team member can say, “With the white hat, I’d like to ask if anyone else knew about X.” With the white hat on, that person can open up and ask for information from others without feeling like they need to be an expert in all things.

SCAMPER is an acronym for a useful list of words that can also be applied to make your team think differently about a problem.

Substitute — What could you substitute as a solution to the problem? Is there another place, approach, or material could you use?

Instead of ____, we can ____

Combine — What could you combine or bring together as a solution? This could be partners, ideas, assets, etc.

We can bring together ____ and _____

Adapt — What could you adapt for use as a solution?

We can adapt ____ in this way ____ to ___

Magnify or Modify — What could you change? What could you add or remove? What could you make stronger or weaker? Higher or shorter? Duplicate or omit?

We can change ___ in this way ___ to ___

Put to other uses — How could you use something in a new way or modify it?

We can re-use ____ in this way ____ by ____

Eliminate — What could you remove? What are you wasting? Can you reduce time spent or cut costs?

We can eliminate ____ by ___

Rearrange — What could be rearranged? Could you use a different pattern, workflow, or schedule?

We can rearrange ____ like this ____ to ____

4. The “Note-and-Vote”

“The Note-and-Vote isn’t perfect, but it is fast. And it’s quite likely better than what you’d get with two hours of the old way.” — Jake Knapp, Google Ventures Team Member

For this exercise, everyone on your creative team receives a sheet of paper, a pen, and five to ten minutes to write down as many ideas as they possibly can. 

Then, the timer is set for two more minutes, and each person chooses between one or two of their favorite items from their list. 

Next, everyone shares their ideas to be recorded on a whiteboard, and everyone on the team votes for their favorite idea. This entire exercise takes only fifteen minutes, and each team member gets to think individually and with the group.

5. Delphi Method

This brainstorming exercise is best used with a distributed group of people or remote teams.

First, send the problem to everyone in the group and ask them to respond with short, bullet-point answers. Then, collect all responses anonymously in a single list and have team members score each idea on a scale of 1-5.

When complete, your team will be left with a valuable list of ideas to explore.

6. Rolestorming

Imagine stepping into the shoes of an iconic figure like the legendary Beyonce. That’s the premise of this exercise, which prompts each team member to adopt someone else’s persona while brainstorming and contemplating how to approach a particular situation or tackle a problem. 

This approach can break down the barriers that often hold people back from sharing their ideas with others and can lead to fresh and unexpected insights.

Who knows? You might even uncover some ideas you would never have thought of otherwise.

You’ve got game–changing ideas but getting them executed and approved can be a pain. That’s where Gain comes in.

With our marketing and social media automation tool, you can streamline your content approval process and get your message in front of your audience faster.

No more tedious workflows, no more delays — just more time to focus on generating amazing ideas that will take your brand to the next level.

Give Gain a try today and see how it can transform your team’s productivity and success!

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17 Creative Brainstorming Methods That (Might) Produce Brilliance

You probably haven't tried a few of these..

Being creative is a muscle--it needs to be worked in order to stay active.

But just like a muscle, it can also get used to the same exercises if you aren't careful to change things up every now and then.

If you're ever stuck in a rut, try one of these:

1. The "J.K. Rowling" Brainstorm: Legend has it J.K. Rowling began her fateful journey to creating the Harry Potter series by writing notes on paper napkins. Whether that's true or not, it is a great exercise to jot down ideas that are very meaningful. Do you know how annoying it is to write on a napkin? It's not a great surface. Which makes what you write all that more special. Go to a diner, order a cup of coffee, and try it.

2. Write 10 ideas every day: This is one of my favorite (and standard) "creative" muscle workouts. Every day, write down 10 ideas you think would be fun to pursue. Don't worry about how long they would take to make, budget, or whether or not they are realistic in any way--just let your mind wander and see what it believes it could make real. You'll be surprised how, after a few days, you'll be flooded with great ideas.

3. Brainstorm every idea that couldn't possibly work. This is like approaching creativity backwards. Next time you're in a meeting and everyone is all, "Let's write down all our best ideas," if you get stuck, try going the other direction. Write down anything and everything that "couldn't possibly work." Funny how this often leads to an obvious and brilliant solution that "just might be crazy enough to work."

4. Write with your non-dominant hand: This is an exercise I learned in college while taking a poetry class. To emphasize the importance of minimalism, we were instructed to write poems with our non-dominant hand. What happens when you do this is you get so frustrated by how slow (and sloppy) you are writing that you actually subconsciously delete words for the sake of getting to the heart of what you actually want to say. The end result? A wildly short and yet provocative piece. Try it--with anything.

5. Draw what you want to say: Even if you are not an illustrator, there is something about using symbols and stick figures to communicate your message instead of words. Whether you are trying to figure out how to organize a proposal, a chapter of your book, a presentation, etc., try drawing your idea instead of writing it out. The words will practically reveal themselves.

6. Construct it all by memory: This is another helpful exercise I've learned through studying poetry. Instead of sitting in front of your notepad and trying to get everything down on paper, construct your message by memory in your head. If you stick with this long enough, two things happen. First, you automatically delete anything that isn't vibrant enough to be remembered (a positive), and second, you keep things short and concise because otherwise you wouldn't be able to remember it. Then, once you've got it all the way you want it, write it down.

7. Speak it as you write it: Give it a voice. Sometimes sitting in silence with your brain running laps ends up working against you. Say it out loud. Hear it. Feel it. Play with it and work with it. Writers especially, read your work out loud. I promise, you'll come up with some amazing material by using your real voice as a tool.

8. Go for a walk with a pen. Just a pen, no notepad. If something really great hits you, write it on your hand. Again, a test in brevity here: When we carry around notebooks we sometimes feel compelled to jot down everything that comes to mind. But if you only have a pen and your tablet is your hand, then you will be more mindful of what you ultimately choose to write down. Brevity tends to reveal the most simple (and best) material anyway.

9. Have an "idea storm." This is one of our tactics at   Idea Booth. For big campaigns, we gather the whole team around our big table and we hold an "idea storm." One person stands at the head of the room (where the walls are painted with idea paint--you can write on them with dry erase marker), and as people contribute ideas, they all get written down on the board. After about 15 minutes, we step back and circle the best ones, and then as a group we dive deep and expand on each one, sharing out loud how we would bring them to life.

10. Read. I mean, so simple but so undervalued. Too many people try to be creative in a vacuum. They sit in a room by themselves and tap their pencil on their desk and wait for brilliance to strike. It doesn't really happen like that. Instead, start reading everything surrounding the challenge: Read about what other people have done in that particular niche, read case studies, read about the history of whatever you are looking to solve, etc. Read, and the answer will reveal itself.

11. Detox from all technology. Again, extremely undervalued and rarely done because it is a challenge, but the results always speak for themselves. Next time you find yourself in a creative rut, take a Saturday, wake up early, and fall off the grid. Turn off your phone and put it in your closet. Don't open your laptop. Spend your entire day detached from the digital world, and every time you get that "inkling" to do something or you get bored, journal or go for a walk or read instead. I promise you, come afternoon you'll be flooded with ideas.

12. Brainstorm in front of an audience.  We all have that friend we share everything with. Well, use them as a resource. If you're struggling with an idea, invite them over, pull out the whiteboard, sit them down, and say, "Look, I just need to think through this out loud. Let me explain what I'm thinking, and then you provide me with any feedback or ideas." By the time you're done explaining the challenge, chances are you'll have realized the answer yourself.

13. Use social media to gain feedback.  That's really what social media is used for--conversation. Instead of spending three months bashing your head against the wall trying to come up with "the perfect idea," just start testing and sharing things on social media and see what people respond to. Brainstorm by interacting with people and adjust as you go along, based on feedback.

14. Wake up at odd hours. This can be extremely jarring but it can also be really effective. If you're used to getting up at 6 or 7 a.m., try getting up at 3 or 4 in the morning, pitch black, and starting your day then. This is not for the faint of heart, but there is something to be said for drastically adjusting your surroundings to spark your creativity.

15. Create it in a completely different format.  As a musician, I tend to do this a lot as a cross-training exercise: I take something I am working on writing and compose the same story through music (piano, an instrumental, a song, etc.). This is another challenge in keeping things concise, and also tends to reveal a lot about the underlying emotions of what it is you're creating. Music is, after all, a language.

16. Write it as a letter. If you're ever struggling to figure out how to say something, or who it is you're "talking to" with what you're creating, image it as a letter to one person. Visualize that one person in your mind: What do they look like? How old are they? What do they want to hear? Write as if you are speaking to them and them only, and watch the voice reveal itself naturally.

17. Create consistently! And finally, the real secret to all creative brainstorming is to do it regularly--every day, no matter what. That's how you keep that muscle engaged and alive. 

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20 Fun Things to Do in St. Petersburg with Kids — Family Friendly Activities!

By: Author David Reeve

Posted on Published: March 12, 2021  - Last updated: October 16, 2023

If you’re on the hunt for a dreamy family escapade, head to St. Petersburg. 

This gem, fondly known as Sunshine City (and for good reason), has got it all. 

And you know what? 

I’ve danced through its artsy streets, built sandcastles on its pristine beaches, and it’s nothing short of a jackpot for families with kiddos.

Hold on, though, because St. Petersburg is not just about the beaches. 

It’s packed with creativity and a kind of pizzazz you won’t find elsewhere. 

I’m talking about hands-on museums, lush parks, and historic spots that are not only educational but also cool enough to make your little ones go, “Woah!”. 

And yes, we’re just scratching the surface. 

Ready to take notes? 

Here’s your ultimate roundup of fun things to do in St. Petersburg with kids.

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Fun Things To Do In St. Petersburg With Kids Compared 

If you’re seeking fun-filled family experiences in St. Petersburg, you’ve hit the jackpot. 

Our top picks will blow your little ones’ minds. 

Editor’s Choice

Guided Segway Tour

Uncover the treasures of downtown St. Petersburg effortlessly with this exhilarating 2-hour Segway tour.

• Age Compatibility: Tweens (10-12 years old)
• Educational Value: 3/5
• Fun Factor: 4/5
• Accessibility: 3/5
• Affordability: 2/5

#2nd Best Choice

Morean Art Center Hot Shop

The Morean Arts Center displays works by local, national, and international artists. Their Hot Shop showcases artists at work.

• Age Compatibility: Young Children (6-9 years old)
• Educational Value: 4/5
• Fun Factor: 3/5
• Accessibility: 4/5
• Affordability: 3/5

#3rd Best Choice

Hyppo Gourmet Ice Pops

The Hyppo Gourmet started in 2010 when a random stranger told Stephen DiMare he should serve gourmet Mexican ice pops if he’d open up a coffee shop.

• Age Compatibility: Preschoolers (4-5 years old)
• Educational Value: 1/5
• Fun Factor: 5/5
• Accessibility: 5/5
• Affordability: 4/5

Here are fun things to do in St. Petersburg with kids.

1. Guided Segway Tour (Editor’s Choice)

Hops2.0, 225 2nd Ave N St. Petersburg, FL 33701 Open in Google Maps

Ratings Criteria

• Unique experience: Riding a Segway can be a thrilling and memorable experience for kids, allowing them to explore the city in a fun and exciting way.
• Educational: The guided tour can provide interesting information about the city’s history, landmarks, and culture, offering educational value along with the adventure.
• Age and safety restrictions: Segways may not be suitable for very young children or those who have difficulty with balance and coordination. 
• Cost: Guided Segway tours are relatively expensive compared to other activities, which may make them less accessible for some families.

Why Your Family Should Go

Here’s why families should give this 2-hour Segway tour in downtown St. Petersburg a whirl. 

Let’s face it, a touch of exploration, a dash of learning, and an easy ride are a recipe for family bonding. 

Discover highlights and hidden gems without breaking a sweat. 

Plus, Segways? 

They’re easier to use than you’d think, and it’s a whole heap of fun to boot​.

What to Do with Kids

Let them lead the way in taking photos and asking questions. 

Encourage them to soak up the knowledge our friendly guides generously share. 

And let’s not forget the sheer joy of mastering a Segway. 

Witnessing your little ones transform into pros? 

Priceless​.

Recommended Ages

When it comes to age, I’d recommend this for those 10 years and up. 

Segways have a minimum weight requirement of 75 lbs, so keep that in mind. 

But trust me, your tweens, teens, and yes, you, too, are going to dig this​.

Recommended Hotel Nearby: The Vinoy® Renaissance St. Petersburg Resort & Golf Club

Related: Best Things to Do in St. Petersburg

2. Morean Art Center Hot Shop

714 1st Avenue N St. Petersburg, FL 33701 (727) 822-7872 Visit Website Social Media Open in Google Maps

The Morean Arts Center displays works by local, national, and international artists.

Their Hot Shop showcases artists at work.

• Educational and artistic: Watching skilled glassblowers create beautiful works of art can be a fascinating and educational experience for kids, exposing them to different art forms and creative processes.
• Interactive: Some hot shops allow visitors to ask questions, engage with the artists, and learn about glassblowing techniques, making it an interactive and engaging experience.
• Limited engagement for younger children: Glassblowing demonstrations may require patience and attention, which younger children may find challenging. 
• Fragility and safety concerns: The hot shop environment involves hot glass and sharp tools, so there may be safety concerns and restrictions on close interaction or touching the exhibits.

For curious artsy tots and older kids, the Hot Shop is a must-stop after the Chihuly Collection.

Glass artists demonstrate just how exactly attractive glass artworks are made.

Watch with the little ones how the science of creating glass works as the assistant narrates the process.

Afterward, drop by the Glass Studio Store to check out the handmade stuff by artists.

You can buy whichever catches your eye.

This scientific, artistic demonstration is entertaining and educational for adults and kids ages 5 and up.

Recommended Hotel Nearby: The Birchwood

3. Hyppo Gourmet Ice Pops

627 Central Avenue St. Petersburg, FL 33701 (727) 498-6536 Visit Website Social Media Open in Google Maps

• Delicious treats: Hyppo Gourmet Ice Pops offers a wide range of unique and tasty flavors, providing a refreshing and enjoyable treat for kids and adults alike.
• Accessibility: Ice pops are easy to consume and can be enjoyed by children of different ages and abilities. 
• Limited educational value: They may not offer significant educational value compared to other activities that focus more on learning or cultural exploration.
• Potential allergies or dietary restrictions: Some children may have allergies or dietary restrictions that limit their options when it comes to ice pops.

Made on-site from the freshest fruit in season, Hyppo’s ice pops became an instant hit among Floridians who need a healthier alternative to ice cream during the scorching summers.

Drop by and pick from among the wide array of ice pop flavors — from spicy to sweet to downright funky.

There are tons of fun, nutritious pops available, and they change every season!

Hyppo Gourmet Ice Pops is a healthy choice during snack breaks with kids ages 3 and up.

Recommended Hotel Nearby: Hollander Hotel – Downtown St. Petersburg

4. St. Petersburg’s Beaches

St. Petersburg, FL (727) 893-7111 Visit Website Social Media Open in Google Maps

St. Petersburg is actually home to a wealth of world-class beaches that consistently rank among the best ones in the entire country today.

With its seat on the western coast of sun-kissed Florida, it is no wonder how St. Petersburg abounds with award-winning beaches featuring the state’s signature snow-white sand and plenty of family things to do.

Treasure Island Beach is popular for beachcombing, and Sunset Beach is, well, where beach bums go for unrivaled sunsets.

Nature lovers, on the other hand, will find the most enchanting tropical scenery at Maximo Beach.

Whether you’re coming over with a baby, a toddler, or a teen, you’re assured of the best family activities in St. Petersburg if you’re escaping to its gorgeous coastline.

Recommended Hotel Nearby: Dolphin Beach Resort

5. Creative Clay

1846 1st Avenue S St. Petersburg, FL 33712 (727) 825-0515 Visit Website Social Media Open in Google Maps

Creative Clay offers people with disabilities the spotlight to create outstanding artworks.

Creative Clay’s gallery is filled with amazing artworks from paintings to ceramics and sculptures all made from handicapped artist-students.

Best of all, these precious artworks are for sale!

Inspire your budding artists by taking them to Creative Clay.

Show them the full potential of each person, regardless of disability, for as long as one believes in their dreams.

Support these artists by purchasing a painting of your choice or donating to take home barely used art supplies!

A trip to Creative Clay is a valuable moment to educate children ages 5 and up regarding disabilities and the importance of equal opportunities.

Recommended Hotel Nearby: Hyatt Place St. Petersburg/Downtown

Also See: Things for Kids to Do in Sarasota Things to Do in Pensacola for Kids Family Things to Do in Clearwater

6. Great Explorations

1925 4th Street N St. Petersburg, FL 33704 (727) 821-8992 Visit Website Social Media Open in Google Maps

Founded in 1986, Great Explorations Children’s Museum aims to stimulate learning in children through creativity and exploration.

If the little ones barely run out of energy, Great Explorations is no doubt the best of all the places to take kids in St. Petersburg.

Offering them a sprawling playground with endless possibilities for fun, this museum introduces them to the world at the same time!

Channel your child’s inner engineer, architect, agriculturist, artist, journalist, adventurer, scientist, veterinarian, and more by letting them run wild around the museum’s exhibits.

The interactive exhibits and kids activities at Great Explorations Children’s Museum are designed for children 10 and under.

Recommended Hotel Nearby: Hampton Inn & Suites St. Petersburg/Downtown

7. Fort De Soto Park

3500 Pinellas Bayway S Tierra Verde, FL 33715 (727) 582-2267 Visit Website Open in Google Maps

Sunshine City prides itself with Fort de Soto, a five-island park that will surely delight young history buffs who also happen to love the ocean.

Located in the southwest region of St. Petersburg, Fort De Soto Park is the largest in the county’s park system.

Stretching to more than 1,000 acres of flourishing plant life, it’s a vast verdure of cheap family fun that you and the kiddos can explore.

Fort de Soto Park is home to some of the best things to do in St. Petersburg with kids.

Little history enthusiasts can enjoy the historic fort and museum.

Active ones will enjoy swimming, biking, or hiking the nature trails.

Try waterfront camping if you’re feeling adventurous!

This adventure to the sea and through the islands’ greenery is a wonderful experience for families with kids ages 3 and up.

Recommended Hotel Nearby: The Don CeSar – Recently Renovated

Also See: Kid Friendly Things to Do in Destin Things to Do in Tampa, FL with Kids Panama City Beach Attractions for Kids Fun Things to Do in Crystal River with Kids

8. Sunken Gardens

1825 4th Street N St. Petersburg, FL 33704 (727) 551-3102 Visit Website Social Media Open in Google Maps

The Sunken Gardens has been around for more than 100 years now, having been planted by an avid gardener and plumber in 1903.

This botanical paradise is a relaxing respite from the hustle and bustle of downtown, a charming solace surrounded by over 50,000 tropical flora.

Wander through the Japanese garden, cactus garden, butterfly garden, and more.

Children will adore the flock of Chilean flamingos and sights of cascading waterfalls.

Book a garden tour for a complete experience.

Sunken Gardens is most enjoyable for children ages 3 and older.

Recommended Hotel Nearby: Staybridge Suites St. Petersburg FL

9. Engine No. 9

56 Dr M.L.K. Jr Street N St. Petersburg, FL 33705 (727) 623-0938 Visit Website Social Media Open in Google Maps

Located at the heart of St. Petersburg’s historic downtown district, Engine No. 9 is an award-winning, family-friendly burger sports bar owned by the son of a hockey Hall of Famer.

In need of a more satisfying gastronomic experience?

How burgers made with 8 oz prime black angus beef sound?

Engine No. 9 offers you the flavors of Florida served on a plate.

Chow down on creative burger choices, hot dogs, salads, sides, and more, and enjoy watching sports games on the mini TV that comes with every table.

Kids ages 7 and older will love the multiple hot dog toppings and sports action as adults sip on local craft brews.

Recommended Hotel Nearby: Holiday Inn – St. Petersburg West

10. Boyd Hill Nature Preserve

1101 Country Club Way S St. Petersburg, FL 33705 (727) 893-7326 Visit Website Open in Google Maps

Boyd Hill Nature Preserve was once a zoo and botanical garden but has since been converted into a natural habitat for native plants and roaming wildlife.

Home to a massive lake, playground, nature camps, picnic site, wildlife, and many more sights, Boyd Hill Nature Preserve is the perfect choice for parents looking for things to do in St Petersburg with toddlers who love the great outdoors.

Explore the diverse ecosystems surrounding the lake, swamp, pine woods, sand scrub, and hammock.

Watch wildlife, visit the aviary of injured birds, and let the kids burn off excess energy at the playground.

Babies, toddlers, older children, and teens will all have a great time with the discoveries one can find at a nature preserve.

Recommended Hotel Nearby: The Inn On Third

Also See: Kids Activities: Gainesville Things to Do in Tallahassee with Kids Things to Do in Lakeland with Kids What to Do in Fort Myers with Kids

11. Central Arts District

Central Arts District St. Petersburg, FL 33701 Visit Website Social Media Open in Google Maps

The Central Arts District is St. Petersburg’s haven for local independent artists across various art disciplines.

Aspiring young artists will find a paradise in St. Petersburg’s Central Arts District, where art can be found outdoors, indoors, and even on food!

Don’t know what to do in St. Petersburg with kids who happen to be lovers of art?

Walk the Central Arts District and view the many walls outdoors that locals turned into their canvas.

Visit galleries and studios, listen to live music, drop by craft stores, and munch on creative snacks.

Children ages 3 and up will enjoy being inundated with all forms of art in this district.

Recommended Hotel Nearby: Avalon Hotel Downtown St. Petersburg

Related: Best Beaches in St. Petersburg

12. Cypress Breeze Farm

North Skyway, I-275 St Petersburg, FL 33715 (727) 460-0891 Visit Website Social Media Open in Google Maps

Cypress Breeze Farms takes good care of horses to offer families happy horseback rides.

Whether you’ve always dreamed of riding a horse through forests or you’ve never heard of riding a horse partially submerged on the beach, Cypress Breeze Farm assures you and the little one’s unforgettable horseback adventures.

Book an appointment with Cypress Breeze Farms to secure rides.

You can ride through farms and shaded trails, swim with horses, learn horse whispering, or even try out equine yoga!

Children have to be ages 6 and older to join the rides.

This activity is particularly fun for teens and school-age children.

Recommended Hotel Nearby: The New Hotel Collection Beachfront

Related: Best Restaurants in St Petersburg

13. Salvador Dalí Museum

1 Dali Boulevard St. Petersburg, FL 33701 (727) 823-3767 Visit Website Social Media Open in Google Maps

This museum’s exterior is as eccentric as the artist it pays homage to.

Though beautifully kooky from the outside, this museum is breathtaking indoors, featuring a large glass entryway, jaw-dropping skylight, and spiral staircase.

The exhibits are the same: weird but undeniably handsome.

Such is the mind of Salvador Dalí!

Explore the brilliant strangeness of Salvador Dalí with the kids and those of the newer generations inspired by his work.

This aesthetic spreads outdoors on the Avant-Garden, a unique yet surprisingly tranquil escape from the mundane.

This museum makes a memorable trip for children ages 5 and up.

Recommended Hotel Nearby: Tru By Hilton St. Petersburg Downtown Central Ave

14. James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art

150 Central Avenue St. Petersburg, FL 33701 (727) 892-4200 Visit Website Social Media Open in Google Maps

Founded by businessman Thomas James, this museum explores the history of the American West, its native inhabitants, and its transformation.

With an interior resembling the iconic canyons of the West, the museum houses elaborate sculptures, paintings, and jewelry of Native Americans that call the West home, as well as artworks of native animals. Exhibits then transition to cowboy culture.

Broaden perspectives on history dating back to thousands of years ago as you weave through exhibit after exhibit with the kids.

The historical and artistic exhibits in this museum are best enjoyed by kids ages 5 and up.

15. St. Petersburg Saturday Morning Market

350 2nd Ave N St. Petersburg, FL 33701 (727) 855-1937 Visit Website Social Media Open in Google Maps

Locals in St. Petersburg decided to come together in 2002 and support local growers and their fresh farm products to the community.

Every Saturday, the Morning Market fills up with 170 vendors and more or less 10,000 people looking for nutritious food and delectable treats.

There are cultural events and craft vendors here for handmade gifts too!

Looking for free kid-friendly things to do in St Petersburg?

Visit the Morning Market this weekend!

You can drop by for a cup of organic coffee, artsy objects, or pastries to ease your sweet tooth.

Best of all, watch locals showcase their talents in music for free!

Many fun things to do in St. Petersburg with kids ages 3 and up can be enjoyed at this bustling market.

16. Skyway Fishing Pier State Park

I-275 St. Petersburg, FL 33711 (727) 865-0668 Visit Website Open in Google Maps

Transformed from the old Sunshine Skyway Bridge, it’s now the world’s longest fishing pier.

Families can enjoy fishing for various species while soaking in panoramic views.

If you’re on the hunt for more fantastic things to do with kids, St. Petersburg has another gem for you: Skyway Fishing Pier State Park.

At this park, your kids will love the thrill of reeling in snook, tarpon, and even red snapper.

It’s a hands-on nature lesson they won’t forget.

If the little ones get restless, snacks, drinks, and bait are available for purchase right on the pier.

It’s a one-stop shop for a day of family bonding and outdoor fun.

Bring your fishing gear and let the kids try their hand at casting lines.

If you’re new to fishing, no worries—bait and tackle shops are nearby.

Lastly, keep an eye out for dolphins and pelicans.

This spot is great for kids aged 6 and up who can appreciate the joys of fishing.

Younger kids might enjoy watching the boats and birds, but the main activities are best for school-age children and above.

Recommended Hotel Nearby: Prestige Collection, Hotel Boutique

17. Florida Holocaust Museum

55 5th St S St. Petersburg, FL 33701 (727) 820-0100 Visit Website Social Media Open in Google Maps

The Florida Holocaust Museum offers an impactful journey through history. 

With its immersive exhibitions, the museum provides a poignant education on the Holocaust that’s both kid-friendly and thought-provoking.

If you’re searching for more educational indoor kids activities, St. Petersburg, Florida has a variety of options.

The Florida Holocaust Museum, for one, is an educational experience that will leave a lasting impression on your kids.

The exhibitions are designed to be engaging for younger audiences without diluting the gravity of the subject matter.

Parents will appreciate the thoughtful layout and the opportunity for meaningful family discussions.

Walk through the exhibitions at a pace that allows your kids to absorb the information.

There are often docents available to answer questions and provide additional context, making the experience more enriching for the whole family.

Given the serious nature of the topics covered, the museum is best suited for kids aged 10 and up.

18. Tropicana Field

1 Tropicana Dr St. Petersburg, FL 33705 (727) 825-3137 Visit Website Social Media Open in Google Maps

Tropicana Field, home to the Tampa Bay Rays, is more than just a baseball stadium.

With its 10,000-gallon touch tank filled with stingrays, it’s a ballpark with a splash of marine life.

If you’re in the St. Petersburg area, and searching for “things to do with kids near me”, check out this field.

Baseball fan or not, there’s something for everyone.

Kids will be thrilled to touch real stingrays in the tank.

And if you’re there for a game, the energy is electric.

Catch a game if you can, but if not, the stadium tours are a worthy substitute.

Let the kids explore the touch tank, and maybe grab some stadium snacks to make the day complete.

Trust me, these experiences are perfect for those mapping out a list of can’t-miss, St. Petersburg kids activities.

Tropicana Field is a hit for all ages, but kids aged 5 and up will get the most out of the touch tank and the game experience.

19. Downtown St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg, FL 33701 Open in Google Maps

Downtown St. Petersburg is an open-air art gallery.

The Central Arts District is adorned with over 70 murals, turning ordinary buildings into canvases.

Art comes alive here in St. Petersburg’s city center.

Kids will love the vibrant colors and imaginative designs, sparking their own creativity.

Parents, you’ll love the photo ops and the chance to introduce your kids to art in a fun, relaxed setting.

You can opt for a guided tour, but exploring the nearby attractions at your own pace is just as fun.

Make it a scavenger hunt to find the most eye-catching mural.

This is a family-friendly activity suitable for all ages.

Even toddlers will be captivated by the bright colors, making it one of the kid friendly things to do in St. Petersburg.

Recommended Hotel Nearby: The Vinoy Resort & Golf Club, Autograph Collection

20. Polynesian Putter

4999 Gulf Blvd. St. Petersburg, FL 33706 (727) 360-9678 Open in Google Maps

Polynesian Putter offers a blast from the past with its tiki-themed mini-golf course.

Think Easter Island heads and faux snakes, all set in a retro 1950s atmosphere.

Exploring Polynesian Putter is like stepping into a time machine to the 1950s tiki culture.

Kids will love navigating the 18-hole course filled with quirky obstacles.

Parents, you’ll get a kick out of the nostalgia while enjoying a laid-back game with the family.

Grab a putter and navigate the tricky holes, but watch out for those faux snakes.

Make it a friendly competition and see who can get the lowest score.

This mini-golf adventure is perfect for children aged 4 and up.

And that’s why it’s one of our favorite fun things to do in St. Petersburg for kids.

The course is manageable for younger players, and the fun obstacles keep it interesting for older kids and adults alike.

Recommended Hotel Nearby: The Saint Hotel

Activity Guide 

Comparing attractions: which one is right for you.

Picking just the right adventure for your family can feel like threading a needle. 

But in beautiful St. Petersburg, the possibilities are as boundless as your child’s imagination. 

Zipping around on a guided Segway tour, we drank in the city’s history, splashed with the vibrant colors of street murals and the shimmering waters. 

But for hands-on learning, nothing beat the Morean Art Center Hot Shop. 

There, we stepped into the mesmerizing dance of molten glass blowing, feeling the heat and watching our own creations come to life. 

End the day? 

Sweet surrender at The Hyppo Gourmet Ice Pops, where unique, natural flavors became a delightfully icy respite. 

Each attraction has its charm, but consider your family’s interests – adventure, creativity, or a sweet treat – and make your choice. 

How I Picked The Activities

Dipping into my treasure chest of experiences, I handpicked these activities with love. 

I’ve been there and breathed in the magic of St. Petersburg myself. 

But my curiosity doesn’t end at my own escapades. 

I chatted with both locals and fellow globe-trotters to see through their eyes and hearts. 

Their stories added layers of depth to my research as I meticulously scoured through travel forums, blog posts, and trusty guidebooks. 

These delightful recommendations are served up with a heaping spoonful of personal experience, research, and the wisdom of the collective wanderlust tribe.

Our Rating Method 

I rate these activities based on the following criteria: 

• Age Compatibility: I use this criterion to assess the ideal age range for each attraction. Is this activity suitable for toddlers, preschoolers, or young children? Will teenagers and tweens enjoy this attraction? I ask myself these questions whenever I assess age compatibility. 
• Educational Value: This is used to evaluate the educational benefits that the activity offers. Does the activity provide learning opportunities to children? Does it teach them lessons in science and history? I ask myself these important questions when rating the activity’s educational value. 
• Fun Factor: This measures the level of excitement, engagement, and enjoyment that the activity offers. Is it engaging and enjoyable for kids? Will it create memorable and positive experiences for families? These questions are important whenever I rate the activity’s fun factor. 
• Accessibility: This measures how accessible the activity is for families. Is it wheelchair accessible? Is it easily accessible by public transportation? Does it have ample parking space? I consider these factors when evaluating the accessibility of every activity. 
• Affordability: This assesses the value of money provided by the activity. Are the admission fees reasonable? Does it offer deals or discounts for families? I use these questions to evaluate the affordability of every attraction. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Is st petersburg good for families.

St. Petersburg is ideal for families. Its pleasant weather, beautiful beaches, and various cultural amenities offer an attractive environment, but some families might be concerned about the higher cost of living and hurricane risks.

What Is There To Do In Saint Petersburg For Free?

Saint Petersburg is abundant with free activities for visitors and residents alike. One can enjoy the picturesque beaches, visit the Sunken Gardens, or take a leisurely stroll along the downtown waterfront which frequently hosts free events and festivals.

Is St. Petersburg An Expensive City?

St. Petersburg is moderately expensive. The cost of living is slightly above the national average, with housing being one of the primary contributors to the expense, while other factors, such as utilities and groceries, are closer to the national average.

Fun Things to Do in St. Petersburg with Kids: Reddit User Recommendations

Best activities for kids in the area by u/pdfruin in StPetersburgFL

Conclusion 

It’s been a whirlwind of fun things to do in St. Petersburg with kids, and each adventure has its own sprinkle of magic. 

But let’s get real here – the Guided Segway Tour is the shining star in this treasure trove.

Because it’s like gliding on a cloud through history and culture, with your kiddos soaking up knowledge like little sponges. 

Sure, the Morean Art Center Hot Shop is a fiery feast for the senses, and Hyppo Gourmet Ice Pops tickles the taste buds. 

But nothing beats the family connection and the wind-in-your-hair freedom of the Segway tour. 

So, pack your bags, grab your tribe, and sashay your way through Sunshine City.

• St. Petersburg

Date Ideas in St. Petersburg, FL

• TripBuzz discovered 98 different types of activities for couples in the St. Petersburg area, including Parks (like Fort De Soto Park), Boat Cruise (like Dolphin Racer), Art Museum (like The Dali Museum) and Segway Tours (like St. Petersburg Segway Tours), and much more.
• We discovered a total of 277 date ideas in or near St. Petersburg, Florida, including 254 fun or romantic activities in nearby cities within 25 miles like Tampa , Clearwater , Madeira Beach and Largo .

Up to 58% Off Sailing Certification Course

Island boat adventures, dolphin racer, florida orange groves & winery, mahaffey theater, sunken gardens, gizella kopsick arboretum, pier dolphin cruises, state theatre, st. petersburg segway tours, the dali museum.

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59 Fun & Unusual Things to Do in St. Petersburg, Florida

• 52 Pinterest

Nicknamed “The Sunshine City” for its year-round fine weather, St. Petersburg could be one of the best family-friendly places to vacation on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Endowed with gleaming white sands and tranquil clear waters, St Pete Beach is often voted one of the nicest in the country — the perfect place for sunbathing or paddleboarding. Its secluded barrier isles are an ideal place to get away from it all and a trip to its many lush parks and preserves are just some of the best things to do in St. Petersburg .

Explore up to 150 species of palm and cycads, as well as the nearly 500 different plants at Gizella Kopsick Palm Arboretum. Then, head to St. Pete Pier for the best green space near the sea!

The city has a thriving downtown district with a distinctly bohemian culture and many arts and cultural places to visit, including some of the country’s top museums and galleries.

The nearby city’s of Tampa and Clearwater, with their world-famous theme parks and attractions, are always just a stone’s throw away. But what to do first?

1 – Be astounded at The Dalí (Salvador Dalí Museum)

One of the 20th Century’s most genre-defying and vital artists, Salvador Dali’s work was as technically brilliant as it was unique. The Spanish-born artist revolutionized the art world with his surrealistic images and flamboyant personal flair.

The Dali Museum is a collection of thousands of items related to the great artist’s career.  Combining a spectacular purpose-built museum with exhibition areas, gardens, a cafe and a center for the avant-garde, this waterfront gallery is one of the most fun places to visit in St. Petersburg.

The James Family Wing holds the museum’s permanent collection of Dalí works, including 96 paintings created by the artist from 1918 to 1970 as well as holograms, sculptures and a lobster telephone.

2 – Cruise the historic city on a segway tour

Why take a bus tour when you can segway? Cruise the city streets on two wheels with these fun segway tours of historic St. Petersburg. Hit all the best sites, including the Victorian-style homes of the Old Northeast, the Tampa Bay area, and the St. Petersburg Museum of History.

Pick up some history on the area’s most famous residents, including the Native American princess Pocahontas, and see historic sites, including the departure point of the world’s first commercial flight, the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat.

Though they may look tricky to maneuver, segways are suitable for everyone and you’ll get the hang of it in no time. Make the most of your time in St. Petersburg, Florida and explore the city on a fun and lively segway tour.

• segway tours in St. Petersburg

3 – Stroll along the St. Pete Pier

The new recreation center of the city, St. Pete Pier has a lot to discover, from shopping, dining and entertainment to sports and parks you’ll find it all here. Dine in style on the rooftop of Pier Teaki or grab a snack at the Driftwood Cafe.

Cool off from the summer heat at the Splash Pad or stroll around the Benoist Centennial Plaza before relaxing on the Bayfront Health Tilted Lawn, there’s something here for the whole family.

Take in the sea views and that fresh sea air as you check out some of the piers artworks, including the Morning Stars Mosaic, the water-inspired sculpture Olnetopia and the stunning net sculpture Bending Arc.

The pier is sure to be your new favorite place to go in St. Petersburg.

4 – Catch a Rays game at Tropicana Field

Home to the Major League Baseball team, The Tampa Bay Rays, Tropicana Field is a must-visit for sports fans while in St. Petersburg. Commonly referred to as “The Trop” by locals, the stadium is the only indoor venue in Major League Baseball capable of hosting events all year long.

• Tropicana Field tickets

As well as baseball games it has also hosted college basketball, football, and pro hockey tournaments. Some of the world’s biggest stars have also performed here including David Bowie, Janet Jackson and the rock group, Kiss.

Check out a Tampa Bay Rays game or see the website to find out what’s happening at The Trop during your time in St. Petersburg.

• Tampa Bay Rays tickets

5 – Find inspiration at the Museum of Fine Arts

For the avid art enthusiast, there’s one place to visit in the city that will appeal above all else – the Museum of Fine Arts . The permanent collection covers almost 5,000 years of human history and creativity and is represented in thousands of objects in various media.

Visitors can see ceramics and porcelains from all over the globe and the museum features a large collection of decorative arts as well as folk art, artworks from indigenous cultures and ceremonial pieces.

You will also find more traditional works such as paintings, sculptures and prints. It has a rotating program of temporary exhibitions alongside its permanent collection and hosts a monthly series of lectures, talks and even cinema screenings. Art lovers won’t want to miss this one.

6 – Hike at Boyd Hill Nature Preserve

If you would like to make the most of your time in St. Petersburg and explore the very best of the city’s natural landscape, Boyd Hill Nature Preserve is a great place to start. It is home to the Lake Maggiore Environmental Education Centre which teaches visitors about the many natural marvels of the preserve.

Looking for a peaceful place to camp? The Terry Tomalin Campground offers primitive camping inside the nature preserve as well as organized nature camps and bike tours. This is especially great for young campers who can learn all about the fascinating web of nature and how it functions inside the preserve.

During your visit to Boyd Hill, why not join one of many nature programs. Take a night hike through the park or catch a speaking presentation on the natural history of the area. As well as its wild and unspoiled beauty, Boyd Hill Nature Preserve really has a full season of activities to enjoy.

7 – Soar over Tampa Bay on a helicopter tour

Okay, what could be better than a helicopter tour over St. Petersburg city and Tampa Bay? Enjoy the invigorating thrill of hovering high above the city on one of these unique helicopter cruises.

Take to the skies in an air-conditioned chopper and see the sites in a truly unique way. Glimpse famous landmarks such as St. Pete’s Pier, John’s Pass and Treasure Island as only a few people get to.

You will cruise over the sparkling waters of Tampa Bay and the luxury beachfront resort, Don CeSar. When soaring high above the barrier islands, keep your eyes peeled for dolphins and other wildlife in the waters below. This is sure to be an experience you will never forget.

• helicopter tours in St. Petersburg

8 – Climb the Weedon Island Preserve observation tower

The huge 3,000-acre Weedon Island Preserve is a must-visit for nature lovers in St. Petersburg. Here you can explore the diverse wetland and upland ecosystems that make up important habitats for local plants and wildlife.

The park has a lot of great routes to hike and almost two miles of boardwalk trails, making it accessible to most people. Visitors can check out the preserve’s education center and even borrow a backpack full of useful trail maps and field guides.

You can follow the boardwalk trail through mangrove forests and tidal streams to the park’s observation tower, which on a clear day provides fantastic views of the preserve as well as Tampa Bay and the city’s of St.Petersburg and Tampa. Why not discover this serene slice of Florida countryside for yourself?

9 – Explore the Chihuly Collection at Morean Arts Center

The Morean Arts Center is a fun and engaging contemporary art space on St. Petersburg’s Central Avenue. It is open daily and puts on a series of art and creative classes, events and parties and also has an artist in residence program.

It houses the first permanent collection of works by American artist, Dale Chihuly in a purpose-built facility. Chihuly is known for his abstract and colorful glass constructions and has pioneered the production methods of elaborate glass artworks during his career. On entering, visitors to the gallery are met with a 20-foot sculpture created specifically for the site.

Admission is free, so why not take a class or explore the artworks during your time in the city. It could just be one of the best cultural things to do in St. Petersburg.

10 – Play and learn at Great Explorations Children’s Museum

If you’re looking for fun and educational things to do with kids in St. Petersburg, stimulate their curiosity at the Great Explorations Children’s Museum . Here they can meet the Explorasaurus and play and discover through interactive games and exhibits.

Try the augmented reality sandbox, where a regular sandbox becomes an entire world with gushing rivers and rocky mountains. Explore the creativity in all of us by imagining what simple tools like a pencil and paper can create.

Great Explorations puts on regular workshops with a focus on environmental topics as well as readings and discussions with authors. It also has a store that sells educational toys, of which 100% of the proceeds go back into the museum. Younger kids are sure to love this!

11 – Spot wildlife at Sawgrass Lake Park

Home to one of the largest Maple swamps on Florida’s Gulf Coast, Sawgrass Lake Park is a haven for local and migratory wildlife. The park is home to many species of birds, including egrets, ibis, herons, and a few reptiles too, such as native turtles and alligators.

It is a popular stop for migrating birds in the spring and fall seasons and, as such, the park attracts a large number of bird spotters who are eager to catch a glimpse of rare wildlife.  It is also an ideal place to see plants and colorful butterflies in their natural habitats.

Why not bring some snacks and make use of the picnic shelter and barbecue facilities after taking a stroll along the boardwalk nature trail and enjoying the sights. Sawgrass Lake Park surely has something for everyone.

12 – Visit the Florida Holocaust Museum

Dedicated to remembering the millions of murdered men, women and children, Florida’s Holocaust Museum is one of the largest of its type in the country. It houses both permanent and temporary exhibitions and is a vital resource for learning about the horrors of the holocaust and the levels of persecution European Jewish people faced.

The museum was founded in 1992 by Walter P. Loebenberg, a local businessman and philanthropist. Loebenberg himself escaped Nazi Germany for Florida and then joined the United States Armed Forces to serve in World War II.

The poignant exhibitions include one of the few surviving boxcars which were used by the Nazis to transport Jews and political prisoners to the death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka. It also keeps an archive of video interviews with holocaust survivors as an integral memento for future generations.

13 – Beat the clock in an escape room

One of the most fun things to do in St. Petersburg, for those who like thrills, puzzles and games in equal measure, is to try an escape room challenge! Gather together your team of friends and family and test your powers of deduction and problem-solving in one of these themed games.

Think outside the box as you solve problems and gather clues in these immersive adventure games. You’ll have to work together to make sure you crack all the puzzles in time and escape the room.

Outerlife Studios is one of the city’s premier escape rooms and allows visitors to choose from themed experiences and settings, including a superhero’s headquarters, a locked apartment with a ticking time bomb or a building set to burn. Will you complete the challenge in time?

• escape rooms in St. Petersburg

14 – Relax under the trees at North Straub Park

If the Florida sun is proving too much for you, why not take a stroll down to North Straub Park. Located on the bayfront between St. Pete’s Pier and 5th ave NE, the park has plenty of shady trees to lounge under, including some big old banyan trees with an unusual-looking aerial root system.

The park has plenty of shaded walkways so it’s the ideal place to go for a refreshing stroll in the cool ocean breeze. It also offers stunning views of the north shore and Tampa Bay and you can take a seat right on the waterfront to check out the yachts in the harbor.

Your four-legged friend needn’t miss out either as North Straub Park has a dedicated dog park and keep your eyes and ears open for year-round events and live music occurring on its permanent stage area.

15 – See gopher tortoises at Egmont Key National Wildlife Refuge

Stuck out on its own in the mouth of Tampa Bay, Egmont Key has been an important ecological preserve since 1974. The island’s strategic position means it has played a major role in many domestic wars and includes the remains of Fort Dade as well as a 100-year-old lighthouse.

It is now an important nesting site for sea turtles, tortoises and hundreds of thousands of sea birds. A visitor favorite on the island is its large colony of gopher tortoises who definitely aren’t shy of people and can be seen trudging around the pathways and roads of Egmont Key State Park. Brown Pelicans are also a common sight in the area with over 600 of the birds calling the island home.

Egmont Key will be one of the most interesting things to do for nature and history lovers in St. Petersburg. Visitors can check out the historic Fort Dade and its large coastal gun battery, Battery McIntosh and the remains of Battery Burchsted, which now floats just off the island.

16 – Get your tickets to the Grand Prix of St. Petersburg

Taking place every March is the event of the year for car lovers in Florida – the Grand Prix of St. Petersburg !

Head down for a racing good time, witnessing the premier racing series of North America, as you learn about the seasoned drivers, and see some of the new talents on the race car scene. Experience one of the most beloved sports in the U.S.!

Do some celebrity spotting while you’re in attendance, and check out the other tons of fun available at the event. Listen to the live entertainment, participate in interactive and race car-themed games, and so much more!

Chill out a bit after the fun at the Speed Zone, or better yet, get to the Beer Gardens for a proper refreshment. Don’t leave without getting your driver’s autograph!

• Grand Prix of St. Petersburg tickets

17 – Go fishing at Skyway Fishing Pier State Park

St.Petersburg is home to a very unique and cool fishing spot in the shadow of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge which spans Tampa Bay. When the Sunshine Skyway was built in the mid-1980s, the old bay bridge was left in place and quickly became popular with local anglers.

It is now considered the world’s longest fishing pier and gives fishermen unrestricted access to the deeper bay waters. What’s better still is that you can drive your car right up to your favorite fishing spot, pretty neat!

You can catch a wide selection of fish here. Common varieties caught at the pier include grouper, Spanish mackerel, red snapper and black sea bass and the bridge is even lit up after dark so you can fish late into the evening.

18 – Check out The James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art

Yeehaw! The James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art is enough to make even the most skeptical of souls feel patriotic. Its collection features contemporary works, mostly created since the 1980s and includes, paintings, sculptures, jewelry and more.

Many of the themes include historical subjects and recently the museum has focused on a selection of works by living Native American artists. It has separate exhibition spaces devoted to the early west, native life, western frontier and wildlife among others.

The collection of jewelry produced by Native American artists is particularly stunning as well as the diverse and dynamic sculptures depicting powerful images of the old west. Definitely check this museum out during your time in St. Petersburg and renew your appreciation for the good ol’ US of A.

19 – Go kayaking at St. Pete Beach

Consistently voted one of the best beaches in the United States, St Pete’s Beach really has it all. Pure and soft white sands, turquoise water and a relaxed and laid-back vibe, what more could you need?

St Pete’s Beach is a great place for families to relax with the calm gentle gulf waters which are perfect for bathing, and action is just a step away. With fun sports to try right here on the beach such as snorkeling, kayaking and standup paddleboarding there’s enough to amuse those who just can’t sit still.

The beach is located just 10 minutes from downtown St. Petersburg, so you’re never far from the lively city center. Hit the beachfront bars and restaurants to try out the best fresh seafood dishes or stroll along the waterfront at sunset to experience the best of this low-key beach town.

• kayaking in St. Petersburg

20 – Take a boat out from Demens Landing Park

Another of the city’s fantastic waterfront green spaces, Demens Landing Park occupies the space which was formerly the city’s first railway pier. It is named after its creator, Peter Demens.

Laying directly on the waterfront between the Central and South Yacht Basins and in close distance to the AI Lang Stadium and Saturday Morning Market, this park is in the most bustling part of the city’s harbor. It has plenty of benches to sit and relax on as well as large green spaces if you want to throw a frisbee around.

If you plan to venture out onto the water while in the city, the park is a good launch point and has a boat ramp that is available for use. There are also picnic benches and public restrooms. This centrally located park is a great place to visit and soak up the atmosphere.

21 – Explore the Gizella Kopsick Palm Arboretum

It’s hard to believe that the lush 2-acre tropical gardens of Gizella Kopsick Palm Arboretum were a mini-golf course not so long ago. This beautiful collection of exotic palms is well worth a visit during your time in the city.

The transformation began in 1976 after a donation of 60 palms of ten different species was gifted by longtime palm admirer, Miss Gizelle Kopsick. The Arboretum was dedicated to Miss Kopsick one year later to celebrate her 100th Birthday.

Over nearly 50 years, the collection has grown to include 150 species of palm and cycads and 500 individual plants. The arboretum is wheelchair accessible and as part of St. Petersburg’s city parks, is free admission.

22 – See amazing Contemporary glass art at Imagine Museum

The newly opened Imagine Museum is one of the first institutions dedicated solely to contemporary glass art in the US. Its collection includes over 1,500 pieces from all over the world as well as a core collection of 500 American studio glass artworks.

This inspiring museum is sure to uplift everyone who visits as it stretches our concept of the applications of glass as a material. The unique pieces collected here display the ingenuity of the individual artists and the wide range of techniques applied in the modern studio glass scene.

The museum displays both permanent and temporary exhibitions and visitors can opt to join a tour of the gallery to gain a deeper insight into the artworks on display. This is a must-see for art lovers but the pieces on display have a diverse appeal that will be fascinating and beautiful to most people.

Definitely check this out.

23 – Cycle the Pinellas Trail

Whatever your preferred way to explore outdoors, be it jogging, walking, cycling or skating — you are bound to enjoy the Fred Marquis Pinellas Trail. The trail starts in St. Petersburg and runs all the way to Tarpon Springs, covering a distance of 50 miles.

The trail runs through a number of towns on the way including South Pasadena, Palm Harbor and Clearwater. This unique and level passageway used to be the route of the Atlantic Coast Line and Seaboard Air Line Railroads which were abandoned in the 1980s.

Why not take a bike tour of the city to learn a little more about its history and the best places to cycle and walk. The Pinellas Trail has some super-scenic stops to visit along the way including Honeymoon Island near Dunedin and Wall Springs Park in Palm Harbor.

• bike tours in St. Petersburg

24 – Sunbathe at Fort De Soto Park

Pinellas County’s largest public park, Fort De Soto Park covers over 1,100 acres and has a huge amount of things to see and do.

The park is spread out over five islands sitting in the mouth of Tampa Bay and features coastal areas, wetlands, forests and meadows, as well as one of the region’s finest beaches. You’ll find plenty here to explore.

Wildlife lovers can spend the day spotting the wide variety of creatures that live in the area. Since the 1960s, 328 species of bird have been documented in the park. Visitors can hike over six miles of trails that stretch between both coasts and past the historic fort.

The park also has over seven miles of waterfront, almost half of which is blanketed with white sandy beaches, two fishing piers and a canoe trail. With two large swim centers, picnic areas and campgrounds, as well as the Quartermaster Museum, you’ll definitely fall in love with Fort De Soto Park.

25 – Spot manatees at Coffee Pot Bayou

The scenic waterfront road, Coffee Pot Boulevard, which skirts by Coffee Pot Bayou has picturesque views of Snell Isle and could be one of the most enchanting spots in St. Petersburg for a stroll.

The Bayou is a great year-round place to spot manatees but especially in the cooler months of the year when the water remains warmer than the surrounding Gulf of Mexico.

The area has charming old waterfront homes with European and Spanish designs and cool tree-lined avenues to explore. The walk over Snell Isle Bridge offers nice views of the historical Renaissance Vinoy Resort and the upmarket neighborhood of Snell Isle.

26 – Pet an alligator at Alligator & Wildlife Discovery Center

Ever wanted to get up close to an alligator? Well now’s your chance! The Alligator and Wildlife Discovery Center allows visitors to do just that, you can even kiss one if you really want to?!

The center offers shelter and rehabilitation to surrendered gators that were bought as pets and outgrew their homes. Visitors get the unique opportunity to see alligators up close and pet and hold them under careful supervision.

Though the primary draw of the Alligator & Wildlife Discovery Center is going to be alligators, there are also plenty of other creatures to get up close to. The center is home to a bunch of unusual and interesting residents including fish, snakes, skunks, lizards, pigs and more.

Don’t forget to show them some love!

27 –  Bike around Maximo Park

Located on Boca Ciega Bay, Maximo Park is both a beautiful waterfront park and also an important archeological site in the city. For thousands of years, the park was home to indigenous American people who fished and lived on these shores. There is information throughout the park about the tribes that once settled here.

Why not take some time to rest under the shady trees and play a game of Tocobaga Disc golf on the specially built 18-hole course. Explore the boardwalk trails and climb the 50-foot observation tower to glimpse some amazing panoramic views of the park.

For the keen fisherman, the park has seven boat ramps giving access to the bay water as well as shoreline fishing areas for those who prefer it. There is also a large selection of picnic shelters available and two playgrounds which is sure to keep the kids entertained.

Maximo Park has something for everyone.

28 – Climb aboard a family-friendly pirate ship

Hoist the sails, don the eyepatch, and get ready for an adventure above the towering Royal Conquest pirate ship! Setting sail from Madeira Beach on Gulf Boulevard (just a short drive north of Treasure Island and St Pete Beach), this stunning vessel promises an amazing day out on the Gulf of Mexico waters for kids and adults alike.

The youngsters can compete in limbo contests, work up a sweat during a little dance party, or cool off in a squirt gun battle — the crew runs interactive activities throughout the 90-minute journey, sure to keep the little ones occupied.

As for the big kids (read: adults), things get even more exciting with the free onboard beer and wine. With several departure times throughout the day (11 am, 1.30 pm, 4.30 pm and 7 pm), you can squeeze it in regardless of your schedule! But ask any former swashbuckling traveler and they’ll attest: the sunset ride is hard to beat.

• pirate ship cruises in St. Petersburg

29 – Campe at Shell Key Preserve

Part of the reason people return to St. Petersburg year after year is for the abundance of unspoiled natural environments it offers, Shell Key Preserve is one such place. An important habitat for nesting birds, Shell Key Preserve includes one of Florida’s biggest areas of undeveloped barrier Islands.

The center of the reserve is a protected area, so not accessible to visitors, but the outer edges have overnight camping facilities which offer the perfect place to really get away from it all. Sleep out under the stars to the sound of the sea lapping the shore and the gentle cry of birds. Paradise!

The Preserve is a great place for wildlife spotting and is a nesting site for sea turtles. Besides turtles, visitors may be lucky enough to spot starfish and fiddler crabs as well as egrets, spoonbills and plovers. Shell Key Preserve is accessible only by boat so plan ahead. Its beautiful beaches are waiting.

30 – Ride the Iron Gwazi at Bush Gardens Tampa

Busch Gardens hardly needs any introduction. This Tampa Theme Park and Zoo has been entertaining visitors for over 60 years with its thrilling white-knuckle rides and attractions. Its newest ride, Iron Gwazi, is the tallest hybrid roller coaster in North America as well as the fastest and steepest in the world.

If that doesn’t tickle your fancy, you can choose from 25+  nausea-inducing roller coasters that will spin you every which way around. For those that like the more sedate life, take a safari ride and view some of the park’s 200 species of animals, including rhinos, elephants and gorillas.

After a busy day of thrills and spills why not take in some live family entertainment. Busch Gardens has jaw-dropping ice skating extravaganzas, storytime shows for kids, and live music by No.1 tribute bands. A day at Busch Gardens is one of the most action-packed things to do in St. Petersburg and is something the whole family will love.

• Bush Gardens tickets

31 – Pay your respects at War Veterans Memorial Park

The sight of a Walker Bulldog tank may not be the most reassuring thing to see in a park but War Veterans Memorial Park is dedicated to honoring the memory of its Military Veterans.

The park has five dedications, one for each branch of the United States Armed Forces. It also has a battlefield cross monument dedicated to the 18 local members of the armed forces who died in the Gulf War.

The park has some nature trails to explore as well as a playground for the kids and even a boat ramp. Check it out while you’re in the area.

Fun fact! The Bulldog tank you see on entering the park is actually a four-man tank from the Korean War era and was built by Cadillac!

32 – Explore the colorful world of Fairgrounds St. Pete

Those expecting Ferris wheels and funhouses won’t be disappointed for long. Fairgrounds St. Pete is an immersive and explorable art and technology exhibition that is a collaboration of 60 artists. It’s a very unique attraction and you won’t find anything like this elsewhere in the state of Florida.

The perfect place to escape reality, even if just for a while, this playful self-contained world has exhibits based on the weird and wonderful stories and history of the region. It allows you to choose your own interaction and offers visitors multiple ways to engage.

This colorful and abstract world will draw you into its narrative, divulging small chunks of information piece by piece until you are hooked. You may find yourself returning to Fairgrounds St. Pete again and again.

33 – Unwind (with a drink in hand) on a tiki boat!

Bringing the laid-back vibe of the tropics to Florida’s Gulf Coast, Tiki Boat tours are all about the open-air party lifestyle.

Each tour runs for between 90 minutes and two hours and is fully equipped with a sound system, coolers and a licensed captain — so all you need to do is BYO food, drinks, and party hats (even if they’re metaphorical), and you’ll be all set.

Whether it’s a birthday, bachelor party, or even something as simple as a family outing on the water, these quirky vessels promise a great couple hours on the later (especially if you set sail in the late afternoon, in time to catch a sunset).

• tiki boat cruises in St. Petersburg

34 – Crack up with the stand-up talent at Spitfire Comedy House

From sketch, stand-up, and improv, enjoy the different comedic stylings of St. Petersburg’s local comedians as well as national ones at the Spitfire Comedy House !

The shows are typically held Friday-Saturday nights, with some shows taking place on Thursdays and Sundays as well, making it the perfect activity to do in St. Petersburg!

Enjoy a variety of shows, from a 40s-style murder mystery improv musical to a freeform comedy showcase, and interactive comedy shows where the audience participates!

If you’re feeling up for it afterward, you can ask about the improv comedy classes that the club offers to build up your own comedy chops!

With a seating capacity of up to 40 people, enjoy the shows in a small group setting. Children can attend, but it is held at the discretion of parents.

35 – Discover handmade beauty at the Museum of the American Arts & Crafts Movement

If you need the inspiration to take up a craft, this is where you’ll find it. Step into a showcase of some of America’s best arts, pottery, textiles and more at the Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement .

This unique museum is dedicated to the movement that spread across America in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as more people turned to creating their own crafted pieces in retaliation against the mass-produced items of the industrial era.

It features over 2,000 items in a stunning gallery that includes a restaurant, cafe and a children’s gallery that will entertain the kids. Admire the furniture, lighting, photography, tiles and jewelry that Americans created and expressed themselves through.

Located in downtown St. Petersburg, the Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement will take you on a journey through the beauty of everything handmade.

36 – Start your weekend with a bang at St. Petersburg Saturday Morning Market

One of the most fun things to do in St. Petersburg on a weekend is to drop by the Saturday Morning Market . Start your day the right way with freshly cooked food, locally farmed groceries and live music.

With over 120 vendors on site selling everything from fresh vegetables, meats and cheeses, teas and coffees and even artisan vegan popsicles, you know you’ll find something here you’re gonna love. The market also has stalls selling freshly cooked international dishes so you better bring your appetite.

Pick up some jewelry from one of the artisan craft stalls or choose some locally produced chocolates as a souvenir of your time in St. Petersburg. A trip to the Saturday Morning Market is a must-do thing while in the city and you can find it opposite Pioneer Park and a stone’s throw from Demen’s Landing.

37 – Spot dolphins at play on a boat tour

The calm waters of Florida’s Gulf Coast offer some of the country’s best conditions for boating. The gentle currents and clear green waters, which are lit up by year-round sparkling sunshine, may make you feel like you’ve found paradise on Earth.

One of the most fun things to do in St. Petersburg is to take a boat tour of the surrounding coastline. There are so many different tours to try that there is bound to be something to suit your tastes. Are you an adventurous speedboat kind of traveler, or a laid-back tiki bar boat kind of person?

Maybe you want to explore under your own steam on a kayak or go out to the deeper waters to spot dolphins playing in the surf? There are so many options you are really spoiled for choice.

Simply choose your departure point, whether from St. Petersburg, Tampa or nearby Clearwater and then enjoy the cruise. This is what St. Pete’s vacays are all about!

• dolphin watching in St. Petersburg

38 – Watch the sunset at Albert Whitted Park

With its privileged position at the southern end of St. Petersburg’s downtown seafront district, Albert Whitted Park has uninterrupted views of those spectacular Florida sunsets. The park is located near the airport and has an airplane-themed children’s playground.

It gained its name from the man who brought commercial aviation to the city in the early 1900s. With beautiful views of the yacht marina as well as some of the city’s most attractive buildings, including The Dalí Museum and Mahaffey Theater, this quiet park is a great place to just kick back and relax.

On busier days it’s a good place to watch the city’s Firestone Grand Prix or catch sight of old-fashioned biplanes taking off and landing at the nearby waterfront airport.

39 – Set sail on a magical sunset cruise

Relaxing, beautiful, and oh-so-very romantic, a St. Pete’s sunset cruise sells itself as the perfect way to end a long day of Florida sightseeing.

Hop aboard a luxurious yacht and take in some of the most incredible views St. Petersburg has to offer — from its striking buildings and sandy shorelines, to the colorfully illuminated Skyway Bridge.

With several companies offering these trips — whether it’s with a group of fellow travelers on a 45-foot modern catamaran or a private charter in an intimate sailboat — you can choose an evening cruise that suits your schedule (and budget).

And for something extra special, there are companies who make a point of venturing into high-traffic dolphin areas!

• sunset cruises in St. Petersburg

40 – See the baseball collection at the St. Petersburg Museum of History

It may seem like a dubious title but St. Petersburg’s Museum of History is home to the world’s largest collection of autographed baseballs. It has 4,999 signed baseballs in its collection, including balls autographed by four US Presidents and even Fidel Castro.

Why not 5,000 you ask? The plan is for Hollywood legend, Tom Hanks, to sign the 5,000th baseball when pandemic measures allow it. More than just a baseball collection though, the museum uses these autographed trophies to tell key moments in the country’s history and tell the story of modern American achievements.

There is even a baseball signed by the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, how is that for iconic! The museum also has an archive of thousands of photos and over 30,000 artifacts in its collection. Take a look around this fascinating museum during your time in the city.

41 – Drive the Sunshine Skyway Bridge

While in St. Petersburg you have to take a cruise over the Sunshine Skyway Bridge to see the exceptional views of Tampa Bay and the nearby cities.

Constructed in the late-1980s to cross Tampa Bay, after the old bridge was badly damaged and collapsed, the current Sunshine Skyway Bridge spans from St. Petersburg South to the north of Terra Ceia. The bridge extends for over 4 miles and at places is towers 190 feet above the water to give the necessary clearance for boats traveling beneath it.

This iconic sight on the Tampa Bay skyline is the second bridge on the site to be named the Sunshine Skyway, the first one was built in the 1960s. Why not take an aerial tour of the bay to and get see the bridge from above? Join a helicopter or light aircraft tour for a unique tour you’ll never forget.

42 – Be amazed by glass art at Duncan McClellan Gallery

St. Petersburg is the place to be for glass art. The Duncan McClellan Gallery is another of the city’s major exhibitions of studio glass and it resides in the most unlikely of places.

Based in a former fish and tomato packing facility, its 7,800 square foot of exhibition space displays work by some of the leading internationally known glass artists.

An intrinsic part of the St. Pete art community, the Gallery is located in the center of the city’s Warehouse Art District. It houses work by dozens of artists and hosts regular exhibitions of contemporary glass art.

43 – Soak up the Florida sun on a boat tour

Enjoy the sunset views from the Gulf of Mexico, as you board the St. Petersburg, Florida: Sunset and Skyway Lights Boat Tour. See as the golden sun sets behind the water, and the lights of the Skyway Bridge begin as you enjoy fresh fruit and refreshments.

The S. Saint Petersburg Pier to Egmont Key Cruise is a 60-minute ferry ride to the stunning Egmont Key. Enjoy views of the turquoise waters, and nature around. Once at Egmont Key, you’ll enjoy 2 hours on its shores to explore the historic lighthouse, nature, and wildlife.

• boat tours in St. Petersburg

44 – Take a run in Vinoy Park

In a perfect position looking out over Tampa Bay, Vinoy Park is one of the city’s most visited attractions. It hosts some of the city’s major outdoor shows like the Tampa Bay Blues and Reggae Rise Up music festivals, The Festivals of Speed Car Show and food fests throughout the year.

featuring lengthy trails throughout, it’s an ideal place to walk or cycle and if you’re looking for somewhere to take your morning run, this place can’t be beaten. The cool breezes blowing in off the bay and sea views are sure to give you all the inspiration you need to get outside and run.

45 – Cruise the bay on a jet boat

A surefire way to see bottlenose dolphins in Tampa Bay is to take a ride on the Dolphin Racer speedboat . Cruise the beaches and waterways of the Gulf Coast on these thrilling and fun adventure rides.

The local population of bottlenose dolphins are a curious bunch and are drawn to the Dolphin Racer as it powers through the bay. They love to play and surf in the boats wake and jump alongside to catch a glimpse of the people onboard.

The trips last for about 1 1/2 to 2 hours and features narration from the team members. The crew is so confident that you will spot dolphins that they even offer a free ride to those who don’t. What are you waiting for?

46 – Explore the lush and tranquil Sunken Gardens

A tropical paradise in the middle of the city, The Sunken Gardens has been wowing visitors to the area for 100 years. It contains some of the best established tropical plants in the region and its collection includes 50,000 specimens including plants, flowers and grasses.

This tropical wonderland was created as a hobby garden by a local plumber in the early 1900s on a six-acre piece of land that formerly held a lake. The rich and fertile soil of the lake bed made the perfect environment for The Sunken Gardens botanical collection.

Visitors can explore its landscaped miniature waterfalls and flowing ponds and see the gardens flock of pink Florida flamingos. Visiting this secret garden in the midst of the busy city might be one of the most invigorating things to do in St. Petersburg and is sure to be a big hit with nature lovers.

47 – Shop, eat and relax at John’s Pass presented by Nathan Shirk Realty

If you’re looking for a one-stop destination for shopping, dining and entertainment in St. Petersburg, John’s Pass will likely fit the bill. With stores selling everything from clothing, apparel and jewelry to sweets, collectibles and Cuban cigars, there’s a lot to see here.

Take a family tour with lunch on the triple decked ship, Calypso Breeze , or board a tiki bar boat for a relaxing booze cruise around the bay. Try your hand at fishing or visit Splash Harbor Water Park for a wild afternoon on the slides.

Afterward, hit up one of the cafes or restaurants to grab a bite to eat and an invigorating coffee or cold beer. The choices are huge and you’re sure to find great fresh seafood, tasty grill and barbecue dishes and all your fast food favorites.

48 – See a live show at Duke Energy Center for the Arts – Mahaffey Theater

On the downtown waterfront within a stone’s throw of The Dalí and the Museum of Fine Arts is one of the city’s largest and finest performing arts venues. The Mahaffey Theater first opened its doors in 1965 and since then has been the place to go in St. Pete for live performances of all types.

Now known as The Duke Energy Center for the Arts, Mahaffey Theater hosts, on any given week, orchestral concerts, Broadway musicals and plays, stand-up comedy shows and touring live bands. Its position at the heart of the city’s waterfront makes it a beautiful venue to visit at any time of the year.

49 – Revel at the bungalows and landscapes at Historic Kenwood

Step back over 100 years just a few minutes from Downtown St. Petersburg. Historic Kenwood is a charming neighborhood with bungalows built in the 1920s when real estate in Florida first flourished.

Stroll along brick sidewalks and imagine the old times, as you admire their well-kept landscapes and rows of trees lining the streets. You can time your visit during the Bungalow Fest in November when the homeowners open their doors and give tours to visitors.

See amazing gardens and get some inspiration, while checking out independent locally-owned coffee shops, restaurants, bars and boutique stores. This eclectic place has something for everyone — even for your furry friend like The Dog Bar . If you want to fully experience the vibe of Historic Kenwood, you can stay for a night or more at the art deco Avalon Hotel less than a two-minute drive from the neighborhood.

Hollander Hotel is also highly recommended and has over 20 craft beers and delicious cuisine to indulge yourself in at the Tap Room and Grill. Courtyard St. Petersburg Downtown is a historic hotel with modern amenities that is sure to tick all the boxes.

50 – Pick your aperitivo at Mazzaro’s Italian Market

Mazzaro’s started out as a coffee roasting business nearly 30 years ago and soon became the locals’ go-to place for anything Italian — stopping by here is one of the essential things to do in St. Petersburg and you won’t leave empty-handed for sure.

This Italian deli has got everything you need to satisfy your Mediterranean cravings such as coffee, wine, cured meats, cheeses, handmade pasta, pizza, bread, pastries, gelato and many more!

Mazzaro’s cellars include the largest selection of Italian wines in Florida. Not sure which wine to bring home? Join one of the free wine tasting sessions every Friday and Saturday lunchtime and get top recommendations from the staff.

51 – Scour the city on a scavenger hunt

Looking for a fun way to explore the city? Why not try a scavenger hunt to discover the best of St. Petersburg’s highlights. Gather together your team and hit the streets for a unique self-guided game experience.

Simply download the app and follow clues and directions to locations around the city. Here you will have to use your eyes and intuition to answer trivia questions and solve puzzles. Uncover the history of the city, explore at your own pace and enjoy working together in these light-hearted and informative challenges.

• scavenger games in St. Petersburg

52 – Shop retro at ARTpool Gallery – Vintage Clothing Boutique & Vinyl Record Store

If you love to shop for vintage, retro and kitsch items, you’re gonna love ARTpool . This independent gallery, clothing boutique and record store is one of the most fun places to visit in the city to pick up those pre-loved gems from a bygone era.

The gallery portion is not restricted to paintings and prints but reflects the eclectic tastes of its owners. In fact, you may find something here that is so unique it defies explanation. The vinyl record store is a great complement to the vintage clothing on offer and will appeal to the crate diggers and record enthusiasts.

ARTpool hosts regular creative get-togethers and a monthly independent craft market. Beware though, you may come out with something fun and frivolous which you didn’t expect.

53 – See rescued otters at St. Petersburg’s aquariums

If you toured the bays and beaches of the region and want to see its most spectacular sea creatures up close, St. Pete has some excellent aquariums to visit.

See rescued native sea creatures at Clearwater Marine Aquarium , including dolphins, sharks, sea turtles and pelicans. Many of the creatures here were in some way injured and cannot be returned to the wild but are well looked after in purpose-built habitats. The aquarium also has freshwater creatures such as its adorable river otters, Walle and Boomer.

The area’s other large facility, The Florida Aquarium , has some fascinating exhibits with native and exotic wildlife habitats. Visit the jungles of Madagascar to see lemurs and tomato frogs, then go deep beneath the sea to witness the elegant dance of the moon jellyfish.

54 – Tour the best craft breweries

After a long day of exploring and beachcombing, you might just be in the mood to check out some of the city’s best craft brews — and where better to go than straight to the source.

3 Daughters Brewery is a great place to start. Sample some of its fruity IPA’s flavored with Florida oranges, mango and watermelon. It also does some more traditional blonde ales, red ales and porters and has a bar with over 40 brews on tap.

For a selection of great beers and whiskies paired with hearty barbecue dishes, URBAN Brew and BBQ is the place to go. This Central Avenue restaurant is family and dog friendly and has a laid-back and relaxed ambiance. This is a great place for bourbon and whisky lovers with a large selection to choose from.

The Cider Press Cafe has a good choice of local and international beers, wines and ciders and also serves up a wide selection of light lunches and snacks. It is a good centrally located place to pick up beers and wines to go.

55 – Experience exciting flavors at the locals’ favorite restaurants

Satisfying your taste buds is part of the deal when you’re in town. Make sure to try some of the best restaurants and their unique and modern take on the traditional cuisine highlighting local ingredients —  including, of course, the best fresh seafood.

Head to 400 Beach Seafood & Tap House if you want to enjoy your surf and turf in a serene atmosphere. This seaside restaurant chooses products from local farms and breweries to stock its menu. For a starter, try Oyster Rockefeller partnered with BBQ Margarita.

Craving for a home-cooked meal? Famous for its fried chicken, PoFolks Restaurant is known for homestyle Southern cooking whether you want vegetables, catfish or barbecue grilled dishes. Give in to your cravings for fish, steak or chicken in its “all you can eat” on Fridays and weekends.

For classic Mexican dishes and cocktails, Red Mesa Cantina has fantastic traditional dishes and a wide selection of tequila. Taste the Shrimp Los Cabos served with avocado, cilantro, sweet tomato cocktail sauce and fresh tortilla chips. Dine next to the fountain in its outdoor courtyard and enjoy the delightful flavors this family-owned restaurant has to offer.

A local favorite, Bodega on Central is a “hole in the wall” known for its Cuban sandwiches and freshly squeezed fruit juices. Locals also recommend its delicious platters which you can diversify according to your preference (including vegan and vegetarian options). Check out the “Frita of the Month”, a Cuban-style hefty burger with exciting toppings.

56 – Take a trolley pub crawl

If you want to sample the St. Pete nightlife, you should definitely try a pub crawl of the city’s best pubs and bars. You could walk, or you could hop on to one of the city’s fun and rowdy trolley tours.

Join other party-goers to pedal your way around the city, stopping at the best drinking holes on the way. Pick up a little history from your trolley captain and best of all, don’t worry about driving.

• pub crawls in St. Petersburg

57 – Have a drink in the best rooftop bars

Where better to while away those sunny Florida evenings than in the city’s best rooftop bars. Enjoy the sunset over a cold beer or cocktail and start your evening the right way.

The Canopy Rooftop Lounge , located on the top floor of the Birchwood Hotel, has beautiful views over North Straub Park and the North Yacht Marina. It is a pretty chic hotel with a good selection of reasonably priced dishes on offer.

Some of the city’s other great rooftop bars include Pier Teaki , at the end of the 2nd Ave NE Pier, Level 11 over at St. Pete Beach and The Cambria Hotel at Madeira Beach. Wherever you choose to go, you’ll be greeted with beautiful sea views to make an evening worth remembering.

58 – Enjoy all the fun for hours at the Historic Manhattan Casino

Step in for a fun time at the Historic Manhattan Casino, located in the lively Grand Central District. Historically known as a meeting space since the mid-20s, the casino has been renovated to reflect modern times while maintaining its community and history intact.

Check out the many things to do inside, from eating your heart out at the food hall to enjoying the soirees that take place here.

Check out the packed calendar, where you can attend everything from film screenings and watch parties, to the dozens of opportunities to join fun mixer events, comedy shows, private concerts, fashion shows, and so much more!

Locals recommend visiting for Sunday brunch as well, or the Jazz concerts on Saturday.

59 – Have a laugh at the Bonkerz Comedy Club

Making St. Petersburg and the country laugh since 1984, the Bonkerz Comedy Club has won the hearts of many, including a few celebrities, as one of their favorite comedy clubs, originally started in St. Petersburg.

The Bonkerz Comedy Club is one of the main comedy venues in Florida, so if you’re looking for a good show, you’ll find it here! The club hosts many celebrity comedians, as well as locals, from pop culture comedy to crude comedy, and relatable comedy – it’s all here!

Shows are typically held every 2nd and 4th Saturday of each month, so be sure to plan ahead!

Pro tip: Buy your ticket ahead of time to receive a $2 discount! Also, seats are first come first serve, so make sure to arrive 1 hour before the show starts!

Where to stay in St. Petersburg?

Check out the comfortable digs inside Crystal Bay Historic Hotel , featuring a 24-hour front desk, shuttle services for guests, and beautiful views out to the terrace and gardens. Breakfast is served daily, which includes vegetarian and vegan options. This hotel is only 3.4 miles away from John’s Pass.

The Holiday Inn Express St. Petersburg North doesn’t disappoint with its highly rated clean rooms, filling breakfast options, and secure free parking. At just a short distance away is the Tropical Sunken Gardens, the Tropicana Field Baseball stadium, as well as a few other notable sights.

Welcoming guest with rows of palm trees, large pools, and beautiful and clean rooms is the Hilton St. Petersburg Carillon Park . Soak up the Floridan way of life at this hotel, and focus on working on your sun tan in the lounge chairs by the pool, or working up a sweat in the state-of-the-art gym.

• best hotels in St. Petersburg

Where to go next?

If you’re in search of exploring other incredible cities and things to do in Florida , then look no further! Go people-watching at the famous Pier 60 in Clearwater as the sunset rolls in, or better yet, set sail on a Pirate Cruise full of non-stop fun activities!

Get nerdy at the Henry B. Plant Museum in Tampa , and afterward devour the goodies inside Ybor City for a taste of Tampa. Hit the mangroves on a kayak in Sarasota , or for the art lovers, head to the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art for stunning works of art.

Take on all the water parks in Kissimmee , from Island H20 Live to Aquatica Orlando, and then wander back in time through Old Town Kissimmee for night fun! Create the perfect picnic to enjoy at Bok Tower Gardens in Orlando , or learn more about some of the local marine life in Crystal River.

Final thoughts

We hope you enjoyed our list of fun things to do in St. Petersburg! Which one was your favorite? Is it the mouthwatering restaurants, or the historic homes of Kenwood? Or perhaps it’s the stunning beaches like Fort De Soto Park?

Whichever it is, let us know! We hope your future travels take you to this Floridian slice of paradise.

Happy travels!