A conceptual graph-based model of creativity in learning

Teaching creativity is one of the key goals of modern education. Yet, promoting creativity in teaching remains challenging, not least because creative achievement is contingent on multiple factors, such as prior knowledge, the classroom environment, the instruction given, and the affective state of the student. Understanding these factors and their interactions is crucial for successfully integrating creativity in teaching. However, keeping track of all factors and interactions on an individual student level may well exceed the capacity of human teachers. Artificial intelligence techniques may thus prove helpful and necessary to support creativity in teaching. This paper provides a review of the existing literature on creativity. More importantly, the review is distilled into a novel, graph-based model of creativity with three target audiences: Educators, to gain a concise overview of the research and theory of creativity; educational researchers, to use the interactions predicted by theory to guide experimental design; and artificial intelligence researchers, who may use parts of the model as a starting point for tools which measure and facilitate creativity.Peer Reviewe

Automatic Creativity Measurement in Scratch Programs Across Modalities

Kovalkov A, Paaßen B, Segal A, Pinkwart N, Gal K. Automatic Creativity Measurement in Scratch Programs Across Modalities. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies. 2021;14(6):740–753.Promoting creativity is considered an important goal of education, but creativity is notoriously hard to measure. In this article, we make the journey from defining a formal measure of creativity, that is, efficiently computable to applying the measure in a practical domain. The measure is general and relies on core theoretical concepts in creativity theory, namely fluency, flexibility, and originality, integrating with prior cognitive science literature. We adapted the general measure for projects in the popular visual programming language Scratch. We designed a machine learning model for predicting the creativity of Scratch projects, trained and evaluated on human expert creativity assessments in an extensive user study. Our results show that opinions about creativity in Scratch varied widely across experts. The automatic creativity assessment aligned with the assessment of the human experts more than the experts agreed with each other. This is a first step in providing computational models for measuring creativity that can be applied to educational technologies, and to scale up the benefit of creativity education in schools

A conceptual graph-based model of creativity in learning

Paaßen B, Dehne J, Krishnaraja S, Kovalkov A, Gal K, Pinkwart N. A conceptual graph-based model of creativity in learning. Frontiers in Education. 2022;7.Teaching creativity is one of the key goals of modern education. Yet, promoting creativity in teaching remains challenging, not least because creative achievement is contingent on multiple factors, such as prior knowledge, the classroom environment, the instruction given, and the affective state of the student. Understanding these factors and their interactions is crucial for successfully integrating creativity in teaching. However, keeping track of all factors and interactions on an individual student level may well exceed the capacity of human teachers. Artificial intelligence techniques may thus prove helpful and necessary to support creativity in teaching. This paper provides a review of the existing literature on creativity. More importantly, the review is distilled into a novel, graph-based model of creativity with three target audiences: Educators, to gain a concise overview of the research and theory of creativity; educational researchers, to use the interactions predicted by theory to guide experimental design; and artificial intelligence researchers, who may use parts of the model as a starting point for tools which measure and facilitate creativity

Modeling Creativity in Visual Programming: From Theory to Practice

Kovalkov A, Paaßen B, Segal A, Gal K, Pinkwart N. Modeling Creativity in Visual Programming: From Theory to Practice. In: Bouchet F, Vie J-J, Hsiao S, Sahebi S, eds. Proceedings of the 15th {International Conference on Educational Data Mining} ({EDM} 2021). International Educational Datamining Society; 2021.Promoting creativity is considered an important goal of education, but creativity is notoriously hard to define and measure. In this paper, we make the journey from defining a formal creativity and applying the measure in a practical domain. The measure relies on core theoretical concepts in creativity theory, namely fluency, flexibility, and originality, We adapt the creativity measure for Scratch projects. We designed a machine learning model for predicting the creativity of Scratch projects, trained and evaluated on ratings collected from expert human raters. Our results show that the automatic creativity ratings achieved by the model aligned with the rankings of the projects of the expert raters more than the experts agreed with each other. This is a first step in providing computational models for describing creativity that can be applied to educational technologies, and to scale up the benefit of creativity education in schools