RADBOUD UNIVERSITY NIJMEGEN VU BICH PHUONG DEVELOPING AND TESTING A SERIOUS GAME TO TRAIN CREATIVE THINKING MASTER SCIENCE THESIS IN BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE NIJMEGEN, THE NETHERLANDS – 2018 RADBOUD UNIVERSITY NIJMEGEN VU BICH PHUONG DEVELOPING AND TESTING A SERIOUS GAME TO TRAIN CREATIVE THINKING MASTER SCIENCE THESIS IN BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE Supervised by: Simone Ritter & Frank Leone Department: Social cognition NIJMEGEN, THE NETHERLANDS – 2018 Running Head: GAME TO TRAIN CREATIVE THINKING Developing and Testing a Serious Game to Train Creative Thinking Vu Bich Phuong Master Science Thesis Supervised by: 1. Frank Leone Date 1st July 2018 GAME TO TRAIN CREATIVE THINKING 2 Abstract Creativity, the ability to generate new and useful ideas, is one of the most desirable employability skills in the twenty-first century. Despite this need, creative ideas are scarce because we have a tendency to activate semantically related information and concepts and thus are constrained from producing new, unconventional ideas. This research aims to develop and test a gamification training program that helps the practice of far conceptual combination.
In Study 1, a computerized game was developed and validated by correlating 49 participants’ game performances with several creativity measures. The results suggest that divergent thinking is central and necessary for game performance. Subsequently, the effectiveness of this game was examined using a pre- and post-training design in Study 2. Three cognitive components of creativity, divergent thinking, convergent thinking and insight problem solving of 27 university students were measured before and after their four-week game training.
It was found that divergent thinking and convergent thinking significantly improved following this creativity game training. Potential for an effective gamification approach and possible improvements for the game training was finally discussed. Keywords: creative thinking, game training, divergent thinking, convergent thinking, insight problem solving GAME TO TRAIN CREATIVE THINKING 3 Developing and Testing a Serious Game to Train Creative Thinking In the fast-changing and uncertain economic outlook, creative thinking has been one of the top five employability skills of employees that organizations desire (Right Management, 2014). Not only in the workplaces of arts, business and sciences, creative thinking can also promote alternative perspectives and offer solutions for daily life’s problems (Tannenbaum, 1997).
As such, researchers in various disciplines such as psychology, management and education have been exploring the ways to enhance creative thinking. Previous studies have developed several training programs and suggested that creativity can be trained (for example, Feldhusen, Treffinger, & Bahlke, 1970; Im, Hokanson, & Johnson, 2015; McFadzean, 1998; Ritter & Mostert, 2016). Specifically, a meta-analysis on training effectiveness suggested that training programs targeting cognitive components of creativity often yield the best results (Scott, Leritz, & Mumford, 2004a). Given the importance of creativity, the objectives of this research were to develop and examine the effectiveness of a training program that targets the underlying cognitive mechanism of creative thinking.
In the following paragraphs, the cognitive foundation of this creativity training will be elaborated on. Then, several elements and their advantages of this training program will be specified. Creativity commonly refers to the generation and recognition of new and useful ideas (Mumford, 2003). However, the fact that creative thoughts happen less often than routine, conventional thoughts can be explained by a cognitive structure called schema, which maps knowledge into domains and categories (Gentner, 1983).
A conceptual structure theory proposes that, because of this cognitive mapping of knowledge, concepts (such as objects and events) and their compatible attributes are processed within a single semantic space (Simmons & Barsalou, 2003). This semantic relatedness explains, for example, why we often have the first thought about “apple” as an exemplar of fruit, instead of thinking about GAME TO TRAIN CREATIVE THINKING 4 technologies (Apple Inc. Moreover, the more compatible properties the concepts share, the more likely they will be activated together. For example, “dog” is closely related to “cat” because they are both pets, have fur and four legs.
This tendency to process information in schemas also explains why we often reach a common, conventional solution when solving problems. However, once problems present information in an unexpected manner, such as in case of riddles, conventional thinking that is processed by schemas cannot provide alternative perspectives to solve these problems. For example, in this riddle: “What goes up and down but does not move?”, “go” and “move” both describe changes in location. Therefore, this challenging, unexpected situation requires a newer, more creative approach to solve.
It is when we realize that, instead of thinking about something that goes up and down in terms of positions, it will make more sense if we think about something that increases and decreases (and the answer is “temperature”). Because existing knowledge is stored by cognitive schemas and cannot offer novel perspectives to solve problems, escaping the existing frameworks and proximity of information may facilitate the production of novel ideas, and possibly creative ideas (Sassenberg & Moskowitz, 2005). It is suggested that mental synthesis of previously unrelated concepts can help generate new properties, functions or associations for them (Ward, Smith, & Finke, 1999). This mental synthesis of concepts is known as conceptual combination.
The novelty of such combinations depend on how distant the concepts are in terms of semantic relatedness (Howard-Jones, Blakemore, Samuel, Summers, & Claxton, 2005), or the degree of incompatible attributes in the parent concepts (Wan & Chiu, 2002). The more distant, dissimilar they are, the more unconventional the conceptual combination is (Chan & Schunn, 2015). It has been found that conceptual combination facilitates divergent thinking, the ability to generate new ideas and a major cognitive process in creativity (Mumford, 2003). In the study of Wan and Chiu (2002), an experimental group who was GAME TO TRAIN CREATIVE THINKING 5 trained in novel conceptual combination showed significant improvements in the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (Torrance, 1974), a standard test of creativity involving divergent thinking skill, while a control group did not.
In another study, stories created by using a set of unrelated words were judged as more creative than by a set of related words, suggesting that semantic divergence in combining concepts is necessary for creative thought (Howard-Jones et al. The importance of conceptual combination in creativity is also supported by other empirical studies (Baughman & Mumford, 1995; Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992). Given that cognitive training with a focus on unique requirements of creativity is more likely to be effective (Scott et al., 2004b), the training program developed in this research will incorporate the practice of conceptual combination to train creative thinking. Given the four main accounts to be considered when designing a creativity training program (Scott et al., 2004b) including targeted cognitive process and skill of creativity, means of delivery, training technique and type of exercises, the following parts will describe our training program with respect to these elements.
Firstly, in terms of targeted cognitive process and skill, the training program in this research focuses on developing conceptual combination and divergent thinking skill. This cognitive approach has been shown to have large effect size and high successful rate (Scott et al. Secondly, the delivery of our training is computerized and gamified. It has been found that game-based learning environment can be entertaining while also engaging the leaners and enhancing their intrinsic motivation (Azriel, Erthal, & Starr, 2005; Hamari et al.
By means of a computerized game, learners can be autonomous and flexible in their own training because no formal, in-person lectures are incorporated. Moreover, this computerized game can be programmed to have short training sessions to avoid lengthy duration, which is common in other cognitive training programs and disadvantageous for their real-life implementation (Ritter & Mostert, 2016; Scott et al. GAME TO TRAIN CREATIVE THINKING 6 Thirdly, next to the practice of conceptual combination, our game training uses visualization as a creativity technique. It is suggested that, because visual images can be scanned and mentally transformed, this will benefit the creative thoughts by allowing rapid detection of incompatible properties of objects or events (Finke, 1996).
In the literature, the studies which target distant associations to enhance creative thinking have also applied imagery technique (Scott et al. Moreover, using universal images can ensure that the training is language independent. Therefore, the practice of conceptual combination in the game is based on visual, colored representations of a wide range of concepts, taken from different semantic categories. For example, there are “dog”, “lion” and “fish”, which are typically known as animals, and there are “durian”, “cherry” and “orange”, which are typical fruits.
This collection of both related (“dog” and “lion”) and unrelated (“fish” and “durian”) concepts will encourage players to visualize and generate associations among them. It also leads to the advantage of the final element, type of exercise, in our game training. By using colored images of familiar, common concepts that can be encountered every day as training stimuli, the type of practice in this training can be domain-unspecific. This means that the skill gained through the exercises can be applied in various settings without specific technical knowledge, making this game training appropriate for the general population.
Taken together, this research aimed to develop a computerized game, which provides an environment for practicing conceptual combination based on visual representations of concepts. The game was programmed in PsychoPy 2 (Peirce, 2007) and several criteria were developed to measure game performance. Subsequently, this research aimed to examine the relationship between game performance and creative thinking in two studies. In Study 1, we validated the game by correlating game performance measures with several creativity tests scores.
We hypothesized that there were positive correlations between game performance and the creativity measures, suggesting that creative thinking is necessary to perform the game. GAME TO TRAIN CREATIVE THINKING 7 Additional information about the participants’ personalities and their opinions about the game were also collected. In Study 2, the effectiveness of this game in training creativity was investigated using a pre- and post-treatment design. A group of young adults underwent the training by playing the game three times per week in four weeks.
We hypothesized that their performances in the creativity tests could be improved following the game training. STUDY 1 Method The aim of this first study was to develop and validate a computerized game, named “The Associates”, by correlating performance in validated creativity tests with performance in the game. A total of 49 undergraduate university students (40 females) from the University of Social Sciences and Humanities Ho Chi Minh city (USSH), Vietnam, were recruited with flyers (Appendix A), email and social media. Their mean age was 20.
Most of them (94%) were majored in psychology. Participant codes were used to ensure anonymity. The experiment took approximately one hour to complete and the participants were rewarded with ₫30,000 (equivalent to €1. This study was approved by the Ethics Committee, Faculty of Social Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, coded ECSW-2017-017R2, and by the Faculty of Psychology, USSH, Vietnam.
Prior to the main testing, a pilot study was conducted to examine how Vietnamese participants perceived and understood the instruments that were translated from English to Vietnamese (Appendix B). All instructions and materials used throughout this research were in Vietnamese language and programmed to present in PsychoPy 2 (Peirce, 2007). GAME TO TRAIN CREATIVE THINKING 8 Divergent thinking. Researchers have recognized that creativity is not a single act but a complex phenomenon, involving, but not limited to, generating many ideas and selecting the most creative, suitable idea (Mumford, 2003).
Thus, one of the creative processes to be measured in this study was divergent thinking, the ability to generate multiple ideas or solutions. The Alternative Uses Test (AUT, Guilford, 1967) is commonly used to evaluate divergent thinking skill. In this test, the participants were required to list as many uses for a common object as possible in four minutes. All participants were presented with two test versions, a brick and a newspaper (Appendix C).
The order of the versions were counterbalanced across the participants.