Who am I:

My name is Farzad Eskafi. I'm a social and education entrepreneur here in Berkeley, CA USA. To be very frank, this is my very first time attempting to raise fund through an online crowd-funding platform. I don't even have a video yet, but I promise I'll make some soon. However, I've been in start-ups all my professional life and ready to launch a start-up in creating games and tasks that enhance creativity. Feedback are more than welcome. Please send them directly to me: [email protected]


The idea for sparcIt originated in my living room when I noticed that my nephew and his friends are enthusiastically playing with Lego blocks. Being a Lego-fan myself, I got excited and decided to join the game. I remembered the time when I was younger and used to spend hours thinking about what and how to build a house or a car or a pyramid or an airplane or a small village. But these new Lego blocks were different. The new Lego boxes came with an instruction manual that provided a step-by-step instruction on exactly what to do with each block. The children, instead of thinking about what and how to build “something,” they were simply following the instruction. There was no creative-work involved.

Why am I doing this?

The simple incident above sparked my research into the field of creativity. The research shows that unlike IQ, creativity and creative-thinking can be learned and enhanced. Furthermore, it can also be measured effectively.

Furthermore, my studies showed that with each successive generation, the average intelligence quotient (IQ) has increased by 10 points. Enriched environments and effective information flow are making us smarter. With creativity, a reverse-trend has been identified: Up until 1990, both the average creativity quotient (CQ) and intelligence quotient (IQ) had been rising. But since then, while IQ has continued its upward trend, CQ has been consistently inching downward. Among many researchers, Dr. Kyung Hee Kim has been the leading researcher in “Creativity Crisis.” Please read about some of her work here and here.

Drs. Michael Wallach and Cliff Wing performed a research on incoming college freshman. Summarized in their book, in studies of incoming college freshmen, little overlap has been found between SAT scores, which is an intelligence measure, and ideation, which is the number and uniqueness of ideas. Interestingly, ideation is the more accurate predictor of achievement outside of the classroom and therefore overall career success. Unfortunately, in the current educational standard, students are accustomed to one-right-answer questions and are hesitant to think of other possibilities or build up a pool of ideas to be evaluated later.

These are just a few sample research out there. But it shows that our children’s creativity is on the decline. Unfortunately, the current educational system is focused on logical and linear thinking whereas nonlinear thinking is not encouraged as much.

How are we doing to improve creativity?

Einstein wasn't the smartest person ever lived. In fact, there are over 2,000 people who have higher IQs than Einstein. But he is among the most creative people who ever existed such as Da Vinci, Picasso, Bernini, Tesla and others.

Why or how were they so creative? Their ingenious wasn't just in their IQ level. It's was also about how they observed their surroundings. When was the last time, you look at the night sky and tried to come up with your own shapes and constellations (and not just what astronomers tell you)? Or when was the last time you looked at a painting and wondered how the artist felt when s/he was drawing it? We have to design tasks and games that encourage outside-of-the-box thinking. But how are we going to do that?

Our brain comprises of two hemispheres: left and right. Our left brain is logical, linear, by-the-numbers, faster and more dominant; our right side is creative, artistic and empathetic. Being the dominant hemisphere, any problem is “grabbed” by the left hemisphere first. Drawing on the newest development in creative thinking R&D and psychology, sparcIt’s exercises are designed such that, the left hemisphere ignores them and the right-hemisphere accepts them. We design and build right-brained quest-based mobile, tablet, and browser-based exercises. But how are we going to measure creativity?



Creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e.: original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e.: useful, adaptive). The exercises are designed using Divergent Thinking (pioneered by J.P Guilford) as well as Pragmatic approach (pioneered by Edward De Bono) in which users are encouraged to answer in as many ways as possible. Among other factors, responses are evaluated based on fluency, originality, and flexibility:

• Fluency is a direct count of the number of responses to a particular task or prompt
• Originality is interpreted as a measure of statistical infrequency which also referred to as cleverness
• Flexibility is based on the number of categories or classes represented in a respondent’s pool of ideas. For example, in response to “List things that have wheels,” a response like “cars, watches, Swiss cheese makers” would be scored as more flexible than “bicycles, tricycles, scooters.”

For demonstration purposes only, let's do one exercise together. Note that this is a simple exercise. My games are going to be far more involved. Let's play a simple mind-mapping game. When I prompt you with the word "leaf", what comes to your mind? A typical and routine answer is the figure below.


However, we encourage users to branch out into different directions. Figure below is a more creative answer. As you can see, the user branched out into multiple directions.


Furthermore, all of our games are placed into one of 6 distinct categories: Design, Play, Empathy, Symphony, Meaning and Story. All these categories are proven to enhance creativity and outside-of-the-box thinking.

If you are an early adopter and want to see the earlier (and less-complete) version of the product, subscribe and join us by sending an email directly to myself @ [email protected].

The success of this project will depend on building a community around the game - We will employ a viral scheme. Users have the option of playing the games and receiving their analysis for free if they fall under one of the two categories below:
·If a user plays more than 5 quests and SparcIt determines that her CQ score is at a good range, she will have the option of rating other users. If she rates the product of 5 users or more, she will receive a free CQ analysis.
·If an invited friend plays a game, the user will receive her CQ score at no charge. Note that the invited friend simply has to play the game, and not necessarily make a purchase, for the user to receive her CQ score.
Using this method, players are able to invite their friends and form their own small community for themselves where they rate, play and provide feedback to each other. As shown, the users are encouraged and given all the incentives to play the games more often and to invite their friends.