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 of

creative 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.

For more information go to…

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCT_02.htm

http://www.brainstorming.co.uk/tutorials/scampertutorial.html