Abstract:

Technology plays a major role in the modernization of society but can also affect human values. As educators, we fear today’s student propensity to adopt the information provided by technological media without reflecting if it is sound or appropriate for their studies. To counter this, we propose a single-player game prototype to increase students' creativity for working in animation, i.e., their creative literacy to ground their animation projects. We chose Design-Based Research as our main methodology because it is grounded on the interdependence of theory and practices with an aim at pedagogical interventions.

The prototype challenges their players to generate associations grounded in a theoretical infrastructure for cultivating creative literacy using games. This infrastructure consists of Dimensions for Creative Literacy, the Players' Behaviors and their surrounding Conditions, Game mechanics for creativity, and the core rules for stimulating creative action, both structured into categories of game actions for creativity: Dialogue, Dialectic, Trial-and-Error, and Synergy. The challenges are aimed at generating actions to be enacted throughout each of the student’s animations according to a three-act narrative structure. Challenges are ordered according to a typology which we abbreviated as A.D.N.: A) articulating actions; D) Describing them using illustration and text; N) allocating them to narrative acts. This typology was then used to structure and implement the game prototype in a PowerPoint template, as this is a program readily accessible, easy to use and to share results. This template was formatted like an open storyboard to allow students to scale their development as they saw fit.

A small pilot was carried out to check the prototype’s potential in augmenting students’ creative reflection in their animations. The results were analyzed by evaluating the responses to A.D.N. challenges and in turn, how this evaluation unveiled students’ preferred categories of actions for creativity. The analysis was complemented with a post-game questionnaire to gather student opinions about the prototype’s functionality and usability. Our analysis points to the broad and abstract nature of the challenges as being often an obstacle to creative reflection, and in rare cases, an explorative creative ground. We suspect that reflecting, tied to the articulation of actions, was relegated in favour of the more tangible typology, the description of the action, as it is what stands out in a storyboard. This notion is grounded on threaded game paths focused on engaging dialogue with the game to probe its challenges without questioning them, in fact preventing the player-game dialectic to uncover convincing actions. Attempts were then made to circumvent this absence by forcing the description of casual actions using trial-and-error, i.e., without synergy, the interconnection between game challenges and their respective interpretations by the player-students.

We intend to lower the understanding barrier in future prototypes by including resolution examples and reformulating the way challenges are presented, so they become more intelligible and apt to infer relevant, creative responses. The pilot sample was framed by a specific area of study, so future development and analysis should also consider factors like psychological profiles and generational factors to uncover clues on how to develop more relevant prototypes for the targeted students.

Keywords:

Creative Literacy, Reflecting, Games, Animation, Storyboard.