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Studying medium effects on children's creative processes

Published: 03 November 2011 Publication History

Abstract

The Fourth Grade Slump, whereby children's creativity drops precipitously at around fourth grade, is a developmental phenomenon that begs for research to be done on ways to nurture children's creativity. We posit that due to its form and formal features, the use of the animated medium for creative activities can positively sustain the child's creativity throughout the Slump. We present a study that investigated how the animated medium (animation) mediates and influences the creative process of children in the third and fourth grade, using the digital print medium (storybook) as comparison. Analysis of the process was done at the structural and production level using mainly the method of discourse analysis.
Children were observed to go through different stages and sequences when creating stories using animation as opposed to the storybook medium. The strategies that the children adopted to create differed along six themes: the prevalence of micro-activities, an integrated and activity-driven process of story generation, a focus on qualitative details producing richer stories, a broader imagination in terms of the story world, the occurrence of serendipitous creativity, and a higher degree of convergence and divergence despite a low seeding level of ideas in story generation. While animation was seen to have certain limitations in the act of creating, it had a largely positive impact on the children's motivation and enthusiasm to engage in the creative activity. Our results have implications for the understanding of the creative process among elementary school children, a necessary first step for the proper design of systems to nurture and sustain children's creativity throughout the Fourth Grade Slump.

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  • (2024)Evaluating digital creativity support for childrenInternational Journal of Child-Computer Interaction10.1016/j.ijcci.2023.10060338:COnline publication date: 27-Feb-2024
  • (2023)XCreation: A Graph-based Crossmodal Generative Creativity Support ToolProceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3586183.3606826(1-15)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2023
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    C&C '11: Proceedings of the 8th ACM conference on Creativity and cognition
    November 2011
    492 pages
    ISBN:9781450308205
    DOI:10.1145/2069618
    • General Chair:
    • Ashok K. Goel,
    • Program Chairs:
    • Fox Harrell,
    • Brian Magerko,
    • Yukari Nagai,
    • Jane Prophet
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 03 November 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. children
    2. creativity
    3. fourth grade slump
    4. medium effects

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    C&C '11: Creativity and Cognition 2011
    November 3 - 6, 2011
    Georgia, Atlanta, USA

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    Cited By

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    • (2024)Evaluating digital creativity support for childrenInternational Journal of Child-Computer Interaction10.1016/j.ijcci.2023.10060338:COnline publication date: 27-Feb-2024
    • (2023)XCreation: A Graph-based Crossmodal Generative Creativity Support ToolProceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3586183.3606826(1-15)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2023
    • (2022)StoryDrawerProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3501914(1-15)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
    • (2020)Evaluating Creativity Support Tools in HCI ResearchProceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3357236.3395474(457-476)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2020
    • (2019)Understanding the Practices and the Products of CreativityProceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children10.1145/3311927.3323117(246-252)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2019
    • (2019)Mapping the Landscape of Creativity Support Tools in HCIProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300619(1-18)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
    • (2019)The Effects of Interactive Emotional Priming on Storytelling: An Exploratory StudyInteractive Storytelling10.1007/978-3-030-33894-7_42(395-404)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2019
    • (2019)Embodying Cognitive Processes in Storytelling Interfaces for ChildrenInteractive Storytelling10.1007/978-3-030-33894-7_37(357-363)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2019
    • (2018)Twenty Years of Creativity Research in Human-Computer InteractionProceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3196709.3196732(1235-1257)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2018
    • (2015)Augmenting Children's Creative Self-Efficacy and Performance through Enactment-Based Animated StorytellingProceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/2677199.2680602(209-216)Online publication date: 15-Jan-2015
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