A Preliminary Creative Process Exploration of Learners’ Behavioral Patterns in a Collaborative Green Building Design Learning Activity Using Minecraft

Abstract

In the era of knowledge economy, creativity can be a critical skill to advance the science and technology development. Thus, in science education, researchers emphasize the importance of creativity and have been advocating the importance of teaching creative thinking skills. While previous studies regarded creativity as an internal process or personality attributes; nonetheless, creativity also can be a collaborative product of social and cognitive interaction among knowledgeable individuals. To understand how creativity can be collaboratively produced and thus could provide adequate guidance for creative collaboration, it is important to depict the patterns of interaction during creative process. However, to the authors’ best knowledge, relative little attention has been devoted to the process of collaborative creativity. In order to address this literature gap, this preliminary study employed a project-based creativity learning activity, which required students to collaboratively design a green building. To design a green building, students have to comprehend and negotiate on the advantages and disadvantages of various energy sources and come up with creative ideas to efficiently reduce energy consumption of the building. This learning activity was expected to improve students’ understanding of the mechanism and cost of various kinds of energy generation by asking students to negotiate on the advantages and disadvantages of varied energy sources when designing the green building. In order to depict the creative process, this study employed a novel approach, which combined quantitative content analysis (QCA) and lag sequential analysis (LSA) to illustrate learners’ behavioral patterns exhibited in the creative process. By improving our understanding of the process of collaborative creativity, we could thus provide adequate guidance for students to go through the creative process. Students might not be born with creativity or know how to think creatively, but the instructor can guide them going through creative process and collaboratively work with each other to produce creative ideas of science and technology development. The novel approach to depict the creative process can be employed to subsequent collaborative creativity research for improving our understanding of the creative process.