Here you can read more about the scientific work we have done with Academy for Creativity, what it is based on, and how we will contribute to the research field in the future.
Here you can read more about the scientific work we have done with Academy for Creativity, what it is based on, and how we will contribute to the research field in the future.
From a neuro science test of 51 students, we observed the impact of the Academy for Creativity games on students’ emotional and attentional response levels. Results show that online games permit the students to maintain a more stable level of attention during the whole training session than what was observed for a control group using traditional paper and pencil creativity exercises. On a scale from 1-5 points (5 for highest), the innovativeness of the games scored 3.7, and the dynamic character and the adjustment of playing time scored 3.4.
We have conducted an experimental training test in which more than 300 students participated as subjects. They were introduced to the E-module in a lecture-like style and were instructed to perform about 1 hours training per day for 10 working days. Results show that students using the Academy for Creativity advanced on all key measures like fluency (29%), originality (44%), elaboration & persuasion (26%), flexibility (21%), and imagination & visualization (38%), compared to the control group, which only received traditional teaching in creativity.
In the modern European society and throughout the world humans are expected to be creative. It is expected that students contribute with new ideas and original thoughts to the success of school assignments, university projects and throughout their professional careers. It is also expected that these students become citizens that take stronger responsibility and are creative in the design of their own lives as well as local, social and health institutions. But is creative thinking innate to our humanity, or is creativity an ability that can be improved?
There are several examples on how to manipulate mental states to temporarily become more creative. This could be executed by using techniques for cognitive stimulation and by using processes for structuring thoughts of individuals and interaction in teams. More interestingly, research suggests that it may be possible to learn the “rules of creativity” by simply training ones’ creative skills.
During the mid-20th century a high number of psychologists turned to creativity research, and with them came the notion that every human can be creative regardless of heritage, development and domain practice. How to train creativity most effectively became well established upon the development of a vast amount of content such as creative training models, processes, techniques, and tools. And since then, researchers have been investigating creativity training programs.
Research on creativity training has been conducted since the 1960s, where one of the earliest studies were executed by Parnes and Brunelle in 1967. Their research on Nurture of Creative Behavior comprised of 40 different studies on the impact on student’s sensitivity, fluency, flexibility, elaboration and many other attributes. The main finding from their research revealed that approximately 90 percent of the 40 studies indicated that student’s creative productivity was significantly increased (Rose and Lin 1984). Other pioneers within the field of creativity training researchers are Rose and Lin (1884) who made a Meta-Analysis of Long-Term Creativity Training and evaluated the results of 46 research studies to measure skills on fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. Moreover, studies show an impressive effect from a wide variety of methods of delivery comprising 10 minutes of training (Freedman, 1965; Cunningham and MacGregor, 2008; Clapham, 1997), 30 minutes of training (Clapham and Schuster, 1992), 5-8 sessions of training (Jausovec, 1994; Burke and Williams, 2008), 1 full day of training (Birdi, 2012), and 3 to 6 full days of training (Baer, 1988; Byrge and Hansen, 2013). The findings provide strong evidence to support the notion of the effectiveness of creativity training, alongside with several researchers agreeing upon this taking departure from their extensive amount of studies (Van Gundy, 1987).
In 2015, The Embodied Creativity Training Research, developed at Aalborg University, showed effect from deliberate practice of creativity on trainees’ self-efficacy and creative production. The study involved 180 trainees and measured the participant’s differences between age, gender, nationality, and differences on creative self-efficacy and creative production. The data analysis showed several indications that deliberate practice of creativity does have a significant effect on an individual’s creative skills. The main finding from the study was that trainees experienced being more creative as a result of the training, including increased open-mindedness, idea generation ability, general thinking ability, perception changeability, as well as increased toolbox, curiosity, awareness and positive attitude. Hence, this supports the notion that creative abilities can be positively improved through creativity training (Byrge and Tang, 2015).
In a world of new technologies, it might be concluded that creativity teaching approaches in the 21st century are simply too formal. This has started a debate regarding students learning how to solve certain types of problems, however, not being able to respond to inevitable and unexpected situations in today’s fast-changing world. Students, in formal educational systems, are taught that knowledge is complete and static rather than focusing on helping students develop as creative thinkers and learn how to create knowledge (Kangas, 2010). Research on creativity training yields insight and gives rise to teaching and educating in a certain approach that is novel in cultivating student’s creative skills in a playful, educational environment. However, even with all the options for information dissemination through modern technology as well as mass productions of hard-copy training materials, we are still in a situation where relatively few people have access to creativity training.
This is why we have created Academy for Creativity; a revolutionizing platform that trains creative competences through serious gaming. We offer students a way to foster creativity through online games to enhance their skills in originality, fluency, flexibility, elaboration & persuasion.
Creativity training is a promising factor, as scientific results show. With Academy for Creativity, we will do further research to determine the link between users improved creative performance and its effects on one’s education, everyday tasks, and business, based on the knowledge acquired by the collected data from our users.
Academy for Creativity gives us the opportunity to study:
We would like to invite researchers from around the world to join our research on the data generated from the users of Academy for Creativity.