Think Tanks and Children's Stories

Like every parent, I'm concerned that my children are too involved in video games. They don't get enough physical activity, they don't socialize enough...you know the litany. One area I'm worried about is creativity.
I remember reading about a family from the 1800's. They had no television, no radio, no video games. For recreation at night, they would play piano, tell stories, and act out plays. This seems to have had a good effect, for one of the daughters became an author, and wrote the story I read.
I wanted to do something with my children that would inspire their creativity. The thing I hit upon was having them write stories. I didn't want it to be a burden, since this would make them hate it and would hinder creativity instead of fostering it.
So I came up with the idea of giving them the beginning of a story, and letting them write the ending. I explained that I didn't necessarily want a lot of words; to me the important thing was to be creative. I told them that there were no right or wrong endings, and that they could imagine whatever ending they wanted.
This got me thinking about how creative writing is done in school. Usually there is an assignment to write about something, and then it is critiqued and graded. While this has its purpose, it seems to me that it doesn't really promote creativity as much as it might. The student tends to be more worried about form than original thinking, and more about satisfying the teacher than himself. These aren't bad things, but I don't think it leads to maximum creativity.
Think tanks are designed to be creative. Experts in different areas are put into a room and given a problem to solve. Generally the problem can only be addressed by considering it from many different angles, which is the reason for the various experts involved.
The mechanism that makes think tanks work is that one person will say something that will trigger a response from another, which in turn makes someone else think of something, and so on, until the group comes up with ideas that no one member of the group could have thinking alone.
The single most important rule when participating in one of these think tanks is that there is no negativity allowed. No saying, "That will never work", or "What a dumb idea!" Worry about negative comments causes the members of the group to be self conscious, and they may then withhold ideas that would have been useful. Even if an idea seems silly, it may trigger a good idea from someone else. How are good ideas ultimately separated from the bad ones? The group will naturally pick up on the good ideas and tend to let the other ideas go.
So I decided that no matter what my children write, I won't ever criticize. I don't want to inhibit their creativity by having to worry about what I might think. Instead, I'll look for the positive, and hopefully this will encourage them to move in the right direction.
So far, I've been working with my two youngest boys, ages 12 and 10. I've tried to invent story beginnings that would appeal to their imagination, that were open ended so there would be lots of possibilities, and that would require some imagination.
OK, now for the fun part. I'm going to give you a few examples of what I'm talking about. Before reading the endings my boys wrote, you might think about how you would end the story.
Story Seed 1-The Forgetful Knight: A young knight has gone off to kill a troublesome dragon. He reaches the dragon's lair and has confronted the dragon. Just as he is about to slay the dragon, he realizes that he forgot his sword. What happens?
Jeff (10): But he did bring his shield. And he also won first place in aiming. So he threw his shield as hard as he could and it chopped the dragon's head off. And then he left.
Andrew(12): Once he arrives at the dungeon cave the big heavy gate behind him closes. Once he's in he draws his sword but he feels nothing there as he thinks of an idea. Once he's done thinking he yells as loud as he can to get the dragon's attention. After a few seconds he sees everything start shaking. He tries with all his might to get it [the gate] open. After trying to open it he sneaks out. Then he goes out and lifts up the gate. The dragon sticks his neck out and he lets the gate go and it shuts on his head.
Story seed 2-The Sewer People: You are walking along and fall into a sewer. To your surprise, you don't fall into a sewer system, but an underground land inhabited by beings (it's up to you to describe them). They have a problem that can be solved easily by something that people have on the surface. Do you help them?
Jeff: They are living pencils. They were out of sharpeners. When I heard the problem I ran to the surface. Then I got to my house. I got all the sharpeners in my house. I got back to the sewers. I gave all the sharpeners I had to them. After that we all had a celebration.
Andrew: They are giant slime monsters. They asked me for an absorbing towel that soaks up water things. I went to Walgreens and got one. We all had a party at the end because they were happy.
Story seed 3-The Magic Caterpillar: You are walking alone in the woods during the beginning of summer and you see a caterpillar. He begins to talk, and tells you he is a magical caterpillar, and can grant you one wish. There's a catch. At the end of the summer, he'll turn into a butterfly, and then he'll ask you for something. The thing he asks for will depend on what your wish was.
Jeff: I wished for eternal life. When I wished for this it was a great summer. I did stuff that would kill me if I hadn't wished for eternal life. But at the end of summer a butterfly came to me and said you must defend me for another summer. The next summer came and I defended the butterfly for the summer.
I've been considering extending this exercise to my daughter, who will shortly turn 16. I think I'll need a different type of story to get her involved. She'd probably like stories that are more realistic and based on human relationships, but I could be wrong.
Does anyone have any ideas for further story seeds? If you do, I'd love to see them, especially any for my daughter.
I'll try to post another set of stories later on.

Paradigms: How do you think about your friends?

It seems to me that understanding paradigms is one of the fundamental concepts you need in your mental toolkit if you want to unlock the apparent mysteries of the human mind. A paradigm is just a fancy name for a model. In our sense, a model is a representation for something else. Models come in all shapes and sizes; they can be physical or abstract, simple or complex, logical or intuitive.
When I was young, I used to make models of battleships, aircraft carriers, airplanes and cars. These models were a physical representation of the real thing. You could tell a lot about the real thing by examining its model. You could get an idea what it looked like and it's proportions. If it was a model of a battleship, you could count the number and type of guns, and see how many life boats it had.
However, these models fall short. I tried putting them in water, and they would flip over on their side. They weren't functional models. This illustrates one of the main ideas of models, or paradigms. In their representations, some areas are of concern while other areas are ignored. In the case of my models, it was important to capture the look, but just about nothing else.
Think about crash test dummies. They are models of the human body. They are designed to model the kines