The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21), a national organization formed in 2002 by the U.S. Department of Education in cooperation with organizations such as Apple Computer, Cisco Systems, and the National Education Association, is a leading catalyst for educational reform in this country. P21 seeks to prepare every child in the United States with the ?21st century knowledge and skills? they need to become competent workers and active citizens. At the top of their list of skills is creativity and innovation, which they say includes not only the ability for individuals to think creatively, but also to work creatively with others and implement innovations into practice. In the spirit of P21?s new focus on creativity and innovation, our research will lead to new insights for STEM education regarding the relationship between creativity and information technology by looking at how young people act when they are given the chance to be technology designers, specifically designers of a mobile game called Re:Activism. This is a game in which game designers challenge players equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS)-enabled devices to visit and learn about areas in their community where significant historical events such as protests, riots, or activist events have occurred. In New York, these sites might include the location of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, for example. Over the course of the project, 3 groups of youth participants will work in teams to design their own versions of Re:Activism using a design process of prototyping, testing, and refining.
Participants will be 11-16 year olds drawn primarily from the after school programs at member institutions of the New Youth City Learning Network (NYCLN). NYCLN is a new initiative sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation and is comprised of a set of cultural institutions in New York that include the New York Hall of Science, the DreamYard project (digital arts program), the New York Public Library, and the Institute of Play (game design program), among others. Through the process of designing their own game, youth participants will learn new ways to link media like photographs to physical locations via geographic and mobile technologies. They will also learn how they can work together to use these tools creatively within the context of game design to craft and share historical stories about their community in a format that can eventually be played by others. In addition to developing new insights for STEM educators, we plan to publish the results of this work in multiple formats and venues within the informal learning community to impact and inform the contemporary dialogue underway within private, public and philanthropic sectors regarding the importance of mobile and geographic technologies in supporting situated and social forms of learning, advancing geospatial understanding, and encouraging community participation and engagement.
Our CreativeIT research project, entitled "Urban Game Design for Creativity, Collaboration and Learning Among Youth," investigated the relationship between youth, creativity and technology through the facilitation of a series of workshops in informal learning contexts such as libraries and community centers. We employed an iterative design approach, a creative process typically employed by design professionals that encourages rapid prototyping and testing, to teach kids how to use iPhones to create their own mobile games and stories. Beginning in March 2011 and ending in April 2013, we conducted five workshops in New York City and Cincinnati, several in underserved neighborhoods, reaching approximately 100 kids who ranged in age from 9 to 16. Our experiences have led to the production of an activity-based curriculum that guides instructors through the steps necessary to run their own workshop. The curriculum begins by teaching kids about the elements of a game--its rules, structures, space, etc. Thereafter kids learn to modify and prototype games. Finally, through a series of directed steps, we familiarize kids with a three-dimensional game space using augmented reality and mobile devices so that they can make their own narrative-based games. This curriculum, freely available as a download from our project website, also showcases the use of the downloadable iPhone app we developed as part of this research project. Together these deliverables can be considered as academic contributions and forms of broad impact within the educational community. Intellectually, this research project has led to three initial findings regarding the relationship between creativity and technology: First, we have identified that the use of narrative is an especially effective device for encouraging youth creativity when using mobile devices. It became apparent in our workshops that kids use stories to relate their surroundings to other people, whether peers or elders. Narrative also appears to enable kids to more easily bridge two-dimensional (2-D) and three-dimensional (3-D) creative spaces, a move that is conceptually abstract for many. We will continue to develop this finding further with ongoing workshops and data analysis. Second, we discovered that kids used paper-based, 2-D bar codes (also called QR codes) as a way to conceptually connect the digital and the physical world together when utilizing abstract spatial thinking. This scaffolded form of connecting physical reality to a digital layer of information appeared to enable kids to use 3-D space as a canvas for mobile creativity more readily. We built on this initial insight within the research project by exploring how augmented reality (AR) could be used to help kids create advanced versions of physical-virtual markers. AR provides the added advantage of allowing kids to self-select real world elements to serve as markers. This inscription process appears to heighten kids’ awareness of the contextual significance of certain places and also enables greater understanding of the technological capabilities and restrictions of the devices and software being used. We took this finding into the design of our own custom mobile application, which will also enable the entire game making process to be controlled on one device thereby avoiding the cognitive breakage that comes from switching between spatial dimensions and design tools. Third, we learned that many kids were having difficulty moving their creative ideas for mobile games and stories into digital formats using map-based tools. We believe these difficulties do not stem from a lack of technical skills, but rather in having to navigate the abstraction of space in the form of a map. Despite the seeming ubiquity of maps, it appears that many kids have never been trained in cartographic skills and, in part because of sophisticated virtual representations in 3-D worlds like video games, have difficulty seeing a map as a representation of 3-D space. This insight suggests that we need to do more to help kids make the transition from 2-D to 3-D space in ways that allow them to continue developing and implementing their creative ideas. It also introduces a challenge to designers and software developers to begin thinking of ways to represent mobile design interfaces that do not rely primarily on cartographic renderings. In summary, this research sought and achieved a structured way to engage urban youth in the creative use of mobile technology by teaching them how to design and develop mobile games and stories in a series of workshops in informal learning settings. We succeeded in creating a set of actionable deliverables including a project website, an activity-based curriculum, and a mobile application. The project also revealed three early intellectual findings, which, as promised, stand to improve the way that contemporary scholars apprehend the relationship between mobile IT, creative expression, situated and social learning, and geospatial understanding. These findings may also impact how practitioners design future mobile tools for gaming and storytelling.
