Robert F. Eberle was an educational administrator in Edwardsville, IL. He wrote about creativity for children and teachers. His most famous creative thinking resource book for creativity instructors is SCAMPER, which is still widely used and available.
A Leader at CPSI for over 30 years Bob was influential in the integration of creativity principles to traditional classroom. “He was a tireless devotee ofcreative thinking and carried his message far and wide…”
SCAMPER is a “checklist” type creative thinking tool that helps people to think of changes they might make to an existing product to create a new one.
Bob Eberle developed SCAMPER to help children easily tap into their natural creativeness based upon Alex Osborn’s 83 questions. Bob chose to keep the list short, simple and used the memory tool of an acronym to make it easy to learn and remember.
S – Substitute – components, materials, people
C – Combine – mix, combine with other assemblies or services, integrate
A – Adapt – alter, change function, use part of another element
M – Modify – increase or reduce in scale, change shape, modifyattributes (e.g. colour)
P – Put to another use
E – Eliminate – remove elements, simplify, reduce to core functionality
R – Reverse – turn inside out or upside down, also use of Reversal.
As M and R is used many times – we tend to call it SCAMMPERR