Color wheels are a traditional project for many teachers. The author has used them in art appreciation classes for many years, but one problem she found when her pre-service art education students created colored wheels was that they were boring: simple circles, with pie-shaped pieces, which students either painted or colored in. This article describes an exercise in which she instructed her class to "create a color wheel that uses the primary, secondary and tertiary colors." They thought this assignment would be easy, but when she continued, "your color wheel cannot be round with pie-shaped pieces, nor can it be traditional in any way," they paid attention, and thought about color in a new way. For her pre-service educators, this was both a new way to think about the color wheel, and the jumping-off point for a real discussion about how traditional projects can be reimagined for a new generation. The lesson plans these pre-service educators created upon completing their assignment showed that they were really thinking about the creative solution and about their future students.