Abstract:

Creativity is a complex and multifaceted concept (Valquaresma and Coimbra, 2022) that emerges in a social and situated context (Glăveanu, Gillespie and Karwowski, 2019) within an iterative and improvisational creative process (Sawyer, 2021). In recent years, it has been highlighted the positive role that technologies can play in engaging people in co-creative settings (Juusola, 2023) and developing the high-level cognitive and social processes involved in co-creation (Sun, Wang, Wegerif and Peng, 2022), helping both students and teachers in their learning and teaching (Sawyer, 2021; Richardson, 2022).

Despite the importance of collaboration or teamwork to solve complex problems and generate innovative solutions, research highlights that groups often perform sub-optimally (Paulus, Baruah and Kenworthy, 2018; Sawyer, 2021). Effective collaborative creativity requires a variety of inputs, effective cognitive, and social processes and develops a nonlinear, iterative and improvisational co-creative process (Sun et al., 2022; Sawyer, 2022).

Our investigation aims to address this gap by presenting the design, implementation and evaluation of the Co-Crea application for supporting cocreative processes. The following research question guided our study: How do students’ perceptions about their cocreative skills change after participating in a course in which a problem-solving task is solved with the co-creative support technology -Cocrea?

Quasi-experimental research was design in which 42 higher education students were enrolled. Experimental group (21 students) solved the challenge using Cocrea application and Control group (21 students) did not use Cocrea application. Students solved the challenge in groups of 4-5 members and for a period of 15 hours.

Currently, the Co-Crea prototype aims to structure, support, enrich and orchestrate co-creative problem-solving with technology support. The co-Crea prototype provides a multi-user collaborative platform and graphic representation of co-creative processes with a set of creative techniques. Co-Crea structures the creative process into the subsequent six non-linear creative phases: Start up; Define; Design; Build Up; Conclude; and Communicate. This six-phase creative process is enriched with a set of co-creative techniques to increase the repertoire of cocreative strategies to solve a challenge innovatively.
All participants completed before and after the Cocrea problem-solving sessions a creativity questionnaire (Azevedo et al. 2016). After the educative intervention, statistical differences were found between experimental and control group students’ perceptions about their cocreative skills. Descriptively,
a) experimental students’ perception of their cocreative skills increased after completing the course;
b) experimental students were more confident than control group to generate novel and innovative ideas to solve a complex problem;
c) experimental students increased their perceptions about their resources to solve creatively a problem; and
d) experimental students increased more their ability to share work with others to solve a complex task.

This study contributes to the scarce literature on promoting co-creativity with interactive technology in real-classrooms and for solving authentic and complex problems. Besides, this paper will provide educative implications in the designing of co-creative support technology.

Keywords:

Co-creativity, co-creativity support system.