CreaMaker

Learning-by-making engages participants in the design and creation of digital and tangible artifacts through different technologies (Maloy & Edwards, 2018; Martin,2015). Maker education activities are developed through collaborative design approaches (Voogt et al., 2015) aiming at conceiving an artifact to provide a creative solution to a problem. Through maker-based activities, participants are engaged in constructionist activities (Papert & Harel, 1991) based on developing an idea, then designing and creating an external representation of that idea (Kafai & Resnick, 1996; Sheridan et al., 2014). Despite a growing number of maker education initiatives in the last years, intergenerational making activities have not yet been analysed in terms of co-creativity. Through the #CreaMaker project we aim to advance the knowledge of the co-creativity process not only in same-age teams but also in intergenerational ones. Maker-based projects have the potential to combine tinkering, programming and educational robotics to engage the learner in the development of creativity both in individual and collaborative activities (Kamga, Romero, Komis, & Mirsili, 2016). Nevertheless, the assessment of creative competencies has not been studied yet in maker-based projects considering age heterogeneity at creative attitudes. #CreaMaker main objective is to analyse co-creativity as a contextual and emergent process in the context of team-based maker activities through an Activity Theory approach (Barma, Romero, & Deslandes, 2017; Fleming, 2015). Within the #CreaMaker project, creativity is analysed not only as an individual competency but also as a team-based process in which the learners’ attitudes are hypothesized as potential antecedents to individual and collective creativity (co-creativity). Learners’ attitudes analysed within the #CreaMaker project include error tolerance (Tulis, 2013), tolerance to ambiguity (DeRoma, Martin, & Kessler, 2003) and risk taking (Davies, 2003); which are engaged when participants co-create solutions to overcome a problem (Barma et al., 2015). Considering the lack of studies combining age heterogeneity and these three attitudes in the analysis of the co-creative process, the #CreaMaker research objectives will contribute to advance knowledge in this field. The #CreaMaker project is based on a Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) approach (Cress, 2008; P. A. Kirschner & Erkens, 2013) applying a mixed-method methodology (Strijbos & Fischer, 2007). The #CreaMaker workshops follow the Change Laboratory methodology (Engeström, 1987, 2015; Sannino, Engeström, & Lahikainen, 2016) and also comprise a quantitative approach based on established psychometrically validated instruments for each of the attitudes (error tolerance, tolerance to ambiguity, risk taking). Four age groups are considered for the study: high-school learners (15 to 18), young adults (19 to 29), adult learners (30 to 59), and older adults (60 to 79). #CreaMaker workshops are conducted in age-specific teams but also in intergenerational teams to test the hypothesis of the co-creativity advantage of teams comprising members of different age groups over teams comprised of one same-age group (H1: intergenerational teams are more co-creative than same-age teams). In same-age teams, we expect participants to show a higher level of co-creativity at younger ages than in later life (H2: younger same-age teams are more co-creative than adults and older same-age teams) and observe different levels of creativity depending on participants’ error tolerance (H3), tolerance to ambiguity (H4) and risk taking (H5). All these hypotheses will be analysed longitudinally through the workshops’ maker-based activities. The research papers, the conference proceedings, the co-creativity instrument, and the workshop activities will be made available through the #CreaMaker website, to ensure an open dissemination of the project instruments and outcomes.