Abstract:

This paper reports on C2Learn (www.c2learn.eu), an ongoing European research project in which our understanding of creativity in education and creative thinking, on the one hand, meets with digital games and intelligent technologies, on the other hand, to provide young learners and their teachers with innovative opportunities for creative learning.

The foundations of the project lie in a consolidated theoretical framework encompassing the theories of Wise Humanising Creativity (WHC) and Creative Emotional Reasoning (CER). C2Learn is about fostering co-creativity in learning, whereby learners, individually as well as mainly collaboratively and also communally, come up with novelty, new ideas.

These new ideas:
a) have emerged through asking ‘what if’ and ‘as if’ questions and through the use of disruptive techniques resulting in re-framing;
b) have emerged from shared ideas and actions in an immersed dialogic rather than hierarchical pedagogical environment;
c) are captured or selected because they matter to the community and have a valuable impact on it.

In this, learners take into account the impact of that novelty on the individual, collaborative and communal dimensions of their community.

Playfulness and in particular digital gaming constitute C2Learn’s chosen means for the involvement of learners and educators in WHC/CER practices. Game design defines the elements of learners’ playful digital experiences and produces the specifications for the development of the corresponding digital games and other playful activities. The design also devises ways for the integration of background Artificial Intelligence technologies exploiting their potential for enhanced playfulness and for added learning value.

End-user school communities are engaged in iterative dialogic cycles leading to the various design decisions and their implementation. The paper particularly focuses on educational scenarios, i.e. the aspect of the design of the C2Learn solution which is most strongly shaped by the collaborating school communities and framed by their educational realities. They are a design tool aiming to provide input directly from educational practice, so that the innovative technologies deployed and practices introduced will correspond to the needs, circumstances, expectations and aspirations of the end users. At the same time, they illustrate to the world of education the range of possibilities offered and examples of effective use of the C2Learn solution. Educational scenarios remain open to elaboration and refinement throughout the project.

In the very early stages, scenarios started as short narratives illustrating possibilities meaningful to users, aiming to present a range of potential directions without being prescriptive. Later on in the first project year, the original scenario ideas were critically examined and selected scenarios were further elaborated. From the second project year onwards, educational scenarios are being transformed from open and generic ideas into concrete use cases, i.e. detailed designs of C2Learn experience in given educational settings. In this sense, scenarios are now becoming an important input into technology development and integration, shedding light on pragmatic restrictions and priorities. In the long term, educational scenarios are provided to teachers and learners as open-ended tools encouraging them to develop their own designs of C2Learn activity, outside the pilots and beyond the end of the project.

Keywords:

Creativity, creative thinking, co-creativity, digital games, educational scenarios, school-community-centred co-design.