Fostering creativity through games and digital story telling (Alessia Eletta Coppi) Interactive Technologies and Games (ITAG) Conference 2015 Health, Disability and EducationDates: Thursday 22 October 2015 - Friday 23 October 2015 Location: The Council House, NG1 2DT

1. Fostering Creativity through
Games and Digital Storytelling
Alessia Eletta Coppi
i2 media research
Goldsmiths, University of London

2. Three main goals:
• Develop a game-based training (Over
the Gate) to foster children’s creativity
using stories and games
• Test the effect of the training on
creativity with a pilot study
• Test the usability of the game
2
Scope of the Work

3. • Three (and a half) creativity theories:
o Guilford (1959) conceived
creativity “as a set of traits”
identifying a series of processes
underlying creativity such as
fluidity, flexibility, originality,
elaboration and evaluation
o Torrance (1968) created the
Torrance Test of Creative Thinking
(TTCT) based on fluidity, flexibility,
originality and elaboration
o Mednick (1962) identified creative
thinking as “the forming of
associative elements into new
combinations”. The process is
composed of three types of
association that are serendipity,
similarity and mediation
o Kanizka (1973) identifies
processes such functional
fixedness and worked on the
restructuration of the field of the
problem
3
A bit of theory: Creativity
• Creativity: A mystery? An insight? A cognitive or association process? A personality
trait?

4. 4
Creativity Empowerment
• Creativity techniques: brainstorming (Osborn, 1963), synectics (Gordon, 1961), adopting
different points of view (De Bono, 1985) or heuristics (Newell and Simon, 1972)
• Pen and paper training:
o Can you imagine! (Myers and Torrance, 1965)
o Thinking Creatively (Davis, 1968)
o Purdue Creative Thinking (Feldhusen, 1971)
o Developing Creative Thinking (Antonietti, 1993)
• Computer training:
o Verbal fluidity with the Logo Training (Clements, 1991)
o Problem solving skills and metacognition (Kobe, 2001)
o Production of ideas (Keog, 2010)
• Question: Why create ‘Over the Gate’?

5. • ‘Over the Gate’ is an e-book composed of an illustrated story and 18 visual and verbal
games based on flexibility, fluidity, originality, association and Gestalt principles
• ‘Over the Gate’ has been built using the main principle of usability for children and
appears like a book with pages containing text, illustrations or games
• While playing, the user has the opportunity to ask for help and is encouraged by the
game to provide multiple answers or to try different strategies
• At the end of every game the user is rewarded with points and feedback about their
performance
5
What is ‘Over the Gate’?

6. • Goal: the user needs to solve the riddle by
identifying two different solutions
• Creativity enhancement: flexibility is
empowered by asking to deconstruct the
riddle’s text and discover a second solution by
avoiding functional fixedness (e.g., synonyms)
6
Over the Gate: Solve the
Riddle!

7. • Goal: the user is instructed to
draw ‘headgear’ for the ‘Queen
of the Sand’
• Creativity enhancement:
flexibility is empowered by the
use of the word ‘headgear’ in the
instructions. This intends to free
the user from the prototypical
drawings of a ‘crown’ and
encourages the child to create an
original drawing
7
Over the Gate: Draw...

8. • Goal: the user has to save the Shepherd (and
his sheep) from the Wolf by moving the
characters on a chess board
• Creativity enhancement: fluidity and flexibility
are enhanced by asking participants to resolve
the game using the available tools multiple
times and in different ways
8
Over the Gate: Save the
Shepherd from the Wolf!

9. • The digital storytelling
component of ‘Over the Gate’
both conveys and explicitly
explores the concept of
creativity
• The story narrates the
adventures of Milo, a child who
is taken on a journey into a
fantasy world by his grandfather
9
Over the Gate: Story

10. • In this world Milo encounters
four main characters who have
lost their creative abilities and
ask him for help
• Milo’s creative efforts serve to
increase his self-confidence
within the story and in turn, aims
to increase the self confidence of
the child player
10
Over the Gate: Story

11. • Sample:
o The experimental group comprised 14 children (mean age=11 years)
o The control group was composed of 10 children (mean age=10.5 years)
• Procedure:
o The experimental group started with the pre test (Test of Child Creativity, TCI), then
worked through the ‘Over the Gate’ training, and finally completed the post test (TCI),
finishing with the metacognition activity
o The control group also completed the TCI at pre and post test, but was exposed only to
the story of the game (without interaction) and there was no metacognition activity
• Usability test: performed with two children using a cognitive walkthrough procedure
11
Pilot Study

12. • The results of the quantitative analysis on the TCI showed no significant difference between
the two groups in the factors of fluidity, flexibility and originality
• The results of the qualitative analysis revealed an interesting insight:
o Game scores:
 Struggle with cognitive restructuring
 Original non-stereotypical drawings
 High scores and different solving strategies in the simulations
o Metacognition activity:
 Awareness of the similarity of the processes used in the game with real life tasks
 Naming and identification of the processes used to resolve the game
o Usability test:
 Engagement was influenced by the type of game
 Emotional reaction to the game multiple answer request
 Misconception about the interface
12
Over the Gate: Results

13. 13
Conclusions
• ‘Over the Gate’ tries to challenge the limits of computers, using them as an
opportunity to develop innovative tools to empower creativity
• Consideration and changes:
o Design: association test, length of the experiment and length of the story
o Engagement: increase of simulations and interactivity
o Metacognition: develop in-game metacognition activity
o Creativity models: incorporate other creativity theories
o Usability: implementation of the interface and app development

14. Special thanks to:
Claudio Lira
Prof. Andrea Gaggioli
Prof. Alessandro Antonietti
Jane Lessiter
Rhiannon Phillips
Luca Zanni
Jonathan Freeman
Thank for your time!
Any questions?