JON04499
Creativity, Imagination and Digital Technology Anthony Jones Department of Science and Mathematics Education The University of Melbourne
[email protected] Abstract School curricula and teachers have traditionally suggested that creativity is only possible in subjects such as art, music, drama and dance. However the digital technology now available to schools can offer users opportunities to be creative in different ways and in other subject areas. Using ideas from recently published UK reports on creativity and creative thinking, grade 1 and 2 students in three classes used pencil and paper to draw houses and people, and then used a computer software package to draw other items. The software package allowed students to draw free-hand, to use built-in graphics features including colour for lines and fill, and to use text. No attempt was made to compare products from the two media forms for creativity. Children who displayed certain characteristics of creativity in their pencil and paper drawings were asked about both their pencil and computer drawings. The tentative results reinforce the belief that creativity is in the child rather than the medium, but that some children respond to a particular medium and demonstrate behaviours not seen in other contexts.
Introduction Education systems in developed countries appear to have actively supported the use of digital technologies in kindergartens, and primary and secondary schools. The associated costs have been substantial in terms of curriculum development, training of teachers, as well as in the provision of hardware and software. For many years teachers have restricted consideration of creativity to areas such as art, music, literature, and dance. As computers and other digital technologies have become ubiquitous in both society and education, they have also started to become an integral part of school curricula. This has resulted in teachers of art, music, writing and dance coming into contact with issues of creativity and technology. There has been much experimentation with, and writing about, students exercising their powers of creativity as part of writing (Abbott 1998,), music (Reynolds 2003), and multimedia (Lachs and Wiliam 1998, Sinker 2000). It can be argued that these are just examples of the subjects that have traditionally been linked to creativity extending these links to incorporate the evolving educational applications of digital technologies. However the focus of this paper will be on curriculum areas not traditionally linked with imaginative and creative thinking in schools – computer studies and mathematics. School and home use of ICT Curriculum documents have suggested applications of ICT in most school subject areas for many years. However many classroom teachers are not exploiting the educational potential of multimedia as a tool for children’s creative thinking by integrating its use into those subject areas traditionally considered to be “noncomputer” or “non-creative”. Until recently teachers could claim that their lack of use of technology resulted from inadequate access to suitable hardware and a general lack of appropriate educational software. These factors should not be significant today in any Australian state or territory.
Teaching and learning have traditionally been considered as linear processes, usually evidenced by the scope and sequence charts included in both curriculum documents and textbooks. However teachers in this early stage of the twenty-first century accept that there is usually more than a single path between where a learner is at any given time and where they will have progressed to as they acquire new knowledge and skills. The examples that follow have been selected to demonstrate that ICT has the potential to facilitate both teachers and students creatively exploring a variety of nonlinear paths. Most Victorian children are five years old when they commence primary school. Even at this age a significant number possess considerable computing related skills and knowledge. Table 1 shows computer and Internet availability in Australian homes in 2002. This data suggests that perhaps four out of five children who commence school will come from a home that has a computer, and three out of five of those children will live in homes that also have Internet access. Entire No children at Children under population home 15 home Computer in the home 61% 53% 79% Internet available in home 46% 40% 59% Table 1: Computers and the Internet in Australian homes, 2002. Source: ABS (2003). Two recent British studies measured similar proportions among homes with school age children in Britain, but go further in their investigation of home computer use. The ImpaCT2 study (BECTA 2003) indicates that school age children spend more time using computers at home than they do at school, and also that the major use of computers at home is for playing games. The “Young People and IT” study (DfES 2002) surveyed more than 1700 school students, and reported that time spent using a computer anywhere averaged 11.4 hours/week for all students. Of this total time 7.5 hours/week occurred at home, with a range from 4.3 hours/week for 5-7 year olds and 10.7 hours/week for 16+ year olds. Table 2 shows the reported hours/week of computer use at home and at school, with a breakdown between game and non-game use. Age 5-7 – Key Stage 1
Age 7-11 – Key Stage 2 Survey total, n = 1748
Total
Total
Non-game
Game
Non-game
Game
Total
Non-game
Game
School 2.2 1.6 0.6 2.6 2.3 0.3 2.9 2.5 0.4 Home 4.3 1.9 2.4 5.4 2.3 3.1 7.5 4.3 3.2 Table 2: Hours/week of computer use at school and home. (DfES 2002, pp.15, 22) Within any class there will be discrepancies in computer skills and knowledge resulting from variations in the level of access to computers at home. However, as Table 3 shows, there are also significant differences between what children actually do when they have access to a computer at home Younger children spent considerably more time playing games, while time devoted to homework and Internet access increased with age. Among students surveyed in the “Young People and IT” study the major reported home use was for game playing (89% for 5-7 year olds) and homework (85% for 11-14 year olds). Table 3 shows major home and school uses of computers reported by 5-7 and 7-11 year old children.
Age 5-7. Key Stage 1
Age 7-11. Key Stage 2 Home % School % Home % School % Playing games 89 55 88 39 Homework or study 4 NA 7 NA Accessing the Internet 13 4 26 27 Drawing pictures 60 54 45 66 Writing stories 15 41 30 27 Table 3: Home and school computer use of 5-11 year olds. (DfES 2002, pp.15, 23) The statistics from both Australia and the UK show that a majority of children in the early years of school use computers relatively extensively at home and at school. In addition there are notable difference both countries between home computer use based on the socio-economic level of the household. Views of creativity The literature is replete with descriptions of creativity and creative thinking, most relating to various of the arts. For the purposes of this paper some non-arts specific characterisations will be considered. The National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE) reported on creativity in a variety of educational contexts, and defined creativity as .. imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are both original and of value (NACCCE, 1999, p.29). The attributes of planning to achieve an outcome that is both novel and worthy appear crucial, as they occur frequently throughout the research literature. In an extensive review of published works on the combination of creativity, learning and digital technology, Loveless (2002, p.12) states, A characteristic of creativity with digital technologies would be the recognition of the potential of the features of ICT to be exploited and experimented with to support creative processes. Loveless links the features of ICT with the five characteristics of creativity proposed by NACCCE (1999), and these are shown in Table 1. Features of ICT Provisionality
NCCCCE Framework for Creativity Using imagination
Interactivity
A fashioning process
Capacity
Pursuing purpose
Range
Being original
Speed
Judging value
Automatic functions Table 1: ICT and the NACCCE Framework for Creativity (Loveless, 2002, p.12) From the starkness of features listed in this table it is not obvious how or if there can be links between technology and creativity.
Creative thinking and digital technology in schools In her chapter “Maps of the mind” Boden (1992) describes a series of drawing experiments with primary age children. Children were asked to draw something they were familiar with, then with this drawing removed were asked to construct a new conceptual space by drawing something that doesn’t exist. Boden claims, Creativity … involves exploration and evaluation. The new idea must be compared to some preexisting mental structure, and judged to be “interesting” by the relevant criteria (Boden, 1992, p.63). A similar experiment was conducted with over sixty grade 1/2 children, aged 6 or 7, from an inner city government primary school in Melbourne. In a computer-room, but without using computers, children were given paper and a pencil and asked to draw “a house”. When this drawing was finished the paper was turned over and the children were asked to draw “a funny house, a house you have never seen”. As can be seen from the examples in Figure 1, there were several ways the children demonstrated creativity in their drawings of houses they have had to construct in their minds.
E’s funny house. Grade 1
A’s funny house. Grade 2
R’s funny house. Grade 2
Figure 1. Children’s drawings of “a funny house, a house you have never seen”. In subsequent lessons children were given opportunities in which they can engage, play and become familiar with the distinctive contributions that ICT can make to their creative practices which other media and tools do not offer (Loveless 2002, p.12). A new aspect of digital technology was introduced in many of the 50 minute lessons, and following a period of explorative play a challenge was posed. The theme of houses was continued over several lessons, commencing with the pencil drawings shown in Figure 1. The samples of children’s work in Figure 2 are products from two different challenges. In one lesson the children were given two procedures, one that drew a small rectangle and one that drew an equilateral triangle. The sides of the equilateral triangle were the same length as the shorter sides of the rectangle. The procedures were called by entering either R or T. Following approximately 10 minutes of exploring the use of these procedures, the children were challenged to make a picture that contained houses produced in different ways. The example presented on the left side of Figure 2 shows one house drawn using the given procedures and another stamped from a MicroWorlds shape. Some pairs of children also drew houses “freehand”.
The final lesson that incorporated the houses theme involved an attempt to introduce children to the concept of three-dimensional representation of a flat surface. At the start of the lesson the children sat on the floor around a cardboard box with each of the six sides a different colour. Individual children were asked to tell which colours they could see. After some discussion in which it was agreed that children on different parts of the floor saw different colours, children were asked to nominate someone who could not see one of the colours they could see. This led to discussion about how many sides they could see, and how to describe, without using colours, the faces of the box that were visible to them. Methods for drawing the box from their perspective were discussed and explored on a whiteboard. The process of drawing two rectangles and then joining corresponding corners with straight lines was presented on the board and then tried with pencil and paper. This resulted in some interesting discussion by the children about mathematical concepts including the surfaces, vertices and edges of rectangular solids, as well as the concepts of hidden and visible lines when drawing a rectangular solid.
Grade 1: Houses from procedures and stamps
Grade 1: A 3D house made from rectangles
Figure 2. Children using digital technology to represent houses The challenge for the children was to create a representation of a rectangular solid using a procedure that drew a large rectangle and any of the usual MicroWorlds drawing tools. If they had time they could turn the rectangular solid into a skyscraper. The suggested method was to use the given procedure to draw two rectangles, to use the straight-line tool to join corresponding corners of the rectangles, and then to erase the lines that would not be visible. As can be seen from the example on the right side of Figure 2, it was not easy for some children to decide which lines to leave and which to erase. Conclusions The activities described in this paper were nominally part of the weekly mathematics lessons for the children. The overall aim of these lessons was to integrate technology (using MicroWorlds software on a computer) into the grades 1 and 2 mathematics curriculum. A secondary aim was to investigate whether the characteristics of creativity (NACCCE 1999) and features of ICT (Loveless 2002) could come together in a mathematical context. The work produced by the children suggests that they were able to demonstrate the application of some characteristics of creativity with both traditional drawing media
and computer-based technology. It was not anticipated that children at this age would use all the characteristics of creativity or any advanced features of ICT. However these (mainly) six and seven year olds were quite skilled computer users, and were willing to tackle conceptually new and difficult challenges with the technology. One question that has not been resolved is whether the children were able to be creative in a mathematical sense, as opposed to an artistic sense. Most of what the children did was based around drawing and colour, and was creative in artistic ways rather than in mathematical ways. This is a challenge for future research. References Abbott, C. (1999) Web publishing by young people. In J. Sefton-Green (ed.) Young People, Creativity and the New Technologies. London: Routledge. 111-121. ABS (2003) Measures of a knowledge-based economy and society, Australia. Information and Communications Technology Indicators. Australian Bureau of Statistics. http://www.abs.gov.au/ [16 December 2003]. BECTA (2003) ImpaCT2 study. Pupils’ and teachers’ perceptions of ICT in the home, school and community. http://www.becta.org.uk/research/research.cfm?section=1&id=562 [15 January 2004]. Boden, M. (1992) The creative mind: Myths and mechanisms. London: Abacus. 4274. CSF (2001) Curriculum and Standards Framework, Technology. Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority. http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/csfcd/te/kste.htm [15 January 2004]. DfES (2002) Young people and ICT. NgfL Research and Evaluation Series No.5. http:// /www.becta.org.uk/youngpeopleict [15 January 2004]. Jones, A.J. (In press) Encouraging creativity with digital technology in early years primary classrooms. Australian Educational Computing. Lachs, V, and Wiliam, D. (1998) Making the computer dance to your tune: Primary school pupils authoring hypermedia. Journal of Computing in Childhood Education, 9(1), 55-77. Loveless, A. (2002) Literature review in creativity, new technologies and learning. Report 4: A report for NESTA Futurelab. http://www.nestafuturelab.org/research/reviews/cr01.htm [19 May 2004]. NACCCE (1999) All our futures: Creativity, culture and education. Sudbury, National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education: DfES and DCMS. http://www.dfes.gov.uk/naccce/index1.shtml [19 May 2004]. Reynolds, N. (2003) Musical composition and creativity in an ICT-enriched learning environment: a case study. In A. McDougall, J. Murnane, C. Stacey and C. Dowling (eds.) ICT and the teacher of the future. Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology, vol.23. 101-103. Robinson, M. and Ellis, V. (2000) Writing in English and responding to writing. In J. Sefton-Green and R. Sinker (eds.) Evaluating creativity: Making and learning by young people. London: Routledge. 70-88. Sinker, R. (2000) Making multimedia: evaluating young people’s creative multimedia production. In J. Sefton-Green and R. Sinker (eds.) Evaluating creativity: Making and learning by young people. London: Routledge. 187-215.
