Creativity education based on participants' reflective thinking on their creative processes

Abstract

Recently, some educational courses focusing on creativity, hereafter called "creativity education" has been conducted in engineering education. We believe that such creativity education is crucial not only in engineering education, but also in general education. In this study, we designed a learning environment that enables participants to experience some common creative activities, and evaluated its effectiveness in a university class. Our educational program consists of the following three phases: (1) introduction (the participants learned the basics of Mindstorms using the instructional manuscript, and subsequently constructed and modified a moving car with four wheels using Mindstorms), (2) creative activities (they produced creative playground equipment that can move using Mindstorms), and (3) self-reflective activities on the creative processes (they reflected on their creative processes and added the information to a diagram, and they discussed advantages and disadvantages while referring to the diagram). We evaluated the effectiveness of our educational program based on comparisons of the pre- and post-tests and the contents of the participants' discussions. In particular, we confirmed the following three learning activities: (1) the participants discussed their creative activities from various viewpoints, (2) they also discussed the viewpoints considered to be important for creative activities, and (3) they realized the importance of idea generation, idea embodiment, and collaboration in creative activities.