Exploring tabletops as an effective tool to foster creativity traits

Abstract

Creativity is a relevant characteristic for people's development as it facilitates the generation of new ideas and innovation processes. Although technology has played an important role on creativity stimulation, it still needs to be explored for a better understanding and support in the context of information and communication technologies. In this paper a basic creativity assessment model is presented and an empirical study has been conducted whose aim is to get insight into whether an interactive surface as base technology for collaborative creative tasks is promising in terms of both collaboration and creativity traits. In the study two tabletop-based platforms (a digitally-augmented, and a physical-only without computer mediation) were involved to solve a problem consisting of creating Rube-Goldberg machines. From these experiments, we have observed that in terms of creativity traits, interactive surfaces seem promising as groups working in the digital platform showed significantly more performance in fluency of thinking, were more motivated, and novelty was found near to significance. Also some issues related to collaboration and interaction were analyzed. In particular, the co-operation, the retrial fine adjustment, and the dominance showed that the properties of an interactive surface tabletop suits better for facilitating the sharing of objects and participation in conditions of co-operation by co-located participants.

Multi-touch gestures for pre-kindergarten children

“…Other studies (Sluis et al, 2004) (Khandelwal & Mazalek, 2007) and (Tyng et al, 2011) have shown that this technology can be used by children between three and seven to learn to read, solve mathematical problems, develop a sense of space, etc. Other studies have demonstrated that the technology can also be used to promote collaboration between peers (Rick & Rogers, 2008) (Rick et al, 2010) (González et al, 2001) and to foster creativity (Helmes et al, 2009) (Catala et al, 2012).…”

Kindertivity

“…Moreover, some studies have demonstrated that the technology can also be used to promote collaboration between peers [16,17,7] and to foster creativity [8,2].…”

Ohr

“…This has been chosen to elicit both the Discovery and Expression pleasures, following also the concept that a too easy game bores the players [3]. In order to foster additional creativity OHR was designed to use a custom-built tangible interface [1].…”