Art and the Hi-tech Boy

Volunteered today for an art-and-music lesson in my son's class, taught by volunteer parents.  It's a once-a-month lesson, and the music portion is extremely limited and not terribly interesting; but the art project (pasting different colored bits of paper to a template based on four characters from "The Nutcracker," including a ballerina, the Mouse King and the Nutcracker himself) proved to be very enjoyable for the students, and taught them something about how creative they could be with texture and color--all within a forty-minute art session.  It was a pleasure to watch them work.  Some were methodical and exacting with their paper and color placement, others (like my son) were more slapdash about it, but managed to be creative in their own way.

My big fear with these art projects is that my son (with his great interest in computers and complete lack of interest in drawing, writing and other fine-motor activities) will not hold his own.  To my surprise and delight, he did fine.  I hovered over him a bit, worried that if he didn't get his template and bits of paper early, he wouldn't be able to complete the project as successfully as the others...I shouldn't have worried so much.  His paper placement was among the least careful of all the students; his ballerina was a bit on the Cubist side of things; but it was still a ballerina in the end, with a variety of well-chosen colors.  

Then he came home and spent about four hours doing simple programming exercises, making a helicopter drone fly in various directions while directing a ball below it to roll through an obstacle course.   He keeps talking about designing his own video game; this has been his big dream for at least three months.  He goes into great detail when he describes the features he wants his game to have.

Dare I say it?  Perhaps his work with computers and iPads has actually stimulated and encouraged his artistic growth.  

How do children become more creative?  That's the basic question perhaps...and I'm pretty sure the Internet generation will find new ways to answer it.