In the early stages of product design, generating creative ideas is crucial for designers as it lays the groundwork for innovative products. This study explores how different idea generation methods, including modern artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) and traditional approaches, affect designers' creativity. Using a mixed-methods approach, we conducted a detailed experiment with 38 s-year university students majoring in product design, comparing four methods: traditional brainstorming (with and without images) and AIGC (using DCGANs and PGGANs). Our findings indicate that while AIGC offers benefits, it does not consistently surpass traditional techniques in fostering creativity. The quality of AIGC-generated images significantly impacts creativity, with higher-quality images proving more inspirational. Additionally, gender differences were observed: male designers preferred traditional methods, while female designers favored AIGC for creative enhancement. Male designers generated more creative ideas when working with low-quality images, whereas female designers were more productive with high-quality stimuli. This study suggests that to optimize creativity in product design, it is essential to balance the benefits of both AIGC and traditional methods, choosing the approach that best fits the project's unique needs rather than focusing solely on the latest or most advanced methods. Moreover, maintaining a good balance between AIGC and traditional idea generation methods throughout the process should be considered.
Collaborative problem-solving (CPS) has become essential in today's society because it provides opportunities for deep learning and critical thinking. During CPS, students tend to spontaneously adopt different roles that facilitate the interactive process. Previous studies have focused on the influence of emergent roles on learning outcomes and CPS skills, but have rarely used procedural approaches to analyze the diversity of and changes in emergent roles during CPS. The availability of naturally occurring educational discourse data provides the opportunity to identify emergent roles at a fine-grained level. Therefore, this study identified emergent roles based on fine-grained coding and used hierarchical regression and epistemic network analysis to explore the influence of emergent roles on learning outcomes through CPS activities and their co-occurrence with CPS skills. The identification of emergent roles was based on observations of 54 undergraduates and postgraduates. The results showed that the participants played different, flexible roles during the CPS process. Roles focused on content and performance appeared more frequently, while those related to social emotion and evaluation were relatively less frequent. Furthermore, knowledge seeker and distractor significantly impeded the success of CPS activities, and harmonizer was conducive to high-quality learning outcomes. In addition, information giver always co-occurred with the skills of maintaining team function. Content- and performance-focused roles usually appeared together with negotiation and coordination. These findings highlight the importance of emergent roles during the CPS process, and provide some practical suggestions for improving learning outcomes and CPS skills.
The objective of this systematic review was to evaluate the evidence on Physical Activity (PA) interventions to foster thinking domain of creativity in children and adolescents, and to investigate the acute and chronic PA interventions variables that moderate creativity outcomes. This review was conducted using the PRISMA framework. A total of 14 studies were identified using WOS and SCOPUS (12 chronic PA and two acute PA intervention), which matched the following criteria: (i) peer-reviewed, longitudinal experimental studies; (ii) studies that included a sample of children or adolescents aged 3–18 years of age; incorporated a PA intervention as the independent variable; (iii) studies with at least one measure of creativity. The total number of participants in the included studies combined was 1539. The results of this review indicate that chronic PA can enhance creativity in school children and adolescents, but the effects varied considerably depending on the qualitative characteristics of the PA and the characteristics of participants. The results of this review suggest that the type of PA, the volume and the intensity of PA may be crucial factors for improving creativity. Regarding the type of PA, games, motor skills, sports and drama activities seem to be the most appropriate, while balancing and walking do not report positive effects. An important finding to emerge from the synthesis was that volume is a key factor, while how they achieve that volume does not have critical implications, as various frequencies of PA were associated with improved creativity. Furthermore, this review identified various moderator variables such as the age of the participants, their creativity level at baseline and whether they were active or inactive.
The use of ChatGPT for educational purposes is in its infancy, and its practical classroom application remains underexplored. While some studies have investigated the impact of ChatGPT on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ critical thinking skills, they have not focused on structured pedagogical designs, leading to limited pedagogical insights. This study aims to fill this gap by examining specific pedagogical designs that leverage ChatGPT to cultivate critical thinking skills among 58 university EFL learners in Macau. Data were collected through pre- and post-tests of critical thinking skills and student reflection journals. Drawing on a post-humanist perspective, this study uncovered innovative results. While the statistical analysis of critical thinking tests suggested that the student participants did not experience significant changes in their critical thinking skills after attending the programme, findings from their reflection journals indicated that the utilisation of ChatGPT assisted students in becoming spatially advised critical thinkers. They perceived ChatGPT as a valuable tool for enhancing cognition and stressed the significance of maintaining a balance between technology and human thought processes to develop critical thinking skills. The findings offered a useful guide on how to use ChatGPT to enhance critical thinking skills and illuminated the influence of ChatGPT on the advancement of students’ critical thinking skills. Implications for both research and practice were discussed.
The aim of this study is to develop "Teaching Practices to Improve Thinking Skills Based on an Interdisciplinary Approach (PTSIA)" and to examine its effect on creative thinking and critical thinking skills of gifted fifth-grade students. This study used explanatory sequential design, which is a mixed research method that combines quantitative and qualitative research techniques. The study group of the research consisted of 62 gifted fifth grade students. For the students in the experimental group, the activities in accordance with the results prepared for the PTSIA for the students in the experimental group were carried out for a total of 45 h, 3 h per week during the extracurricular hours. The study used both quantitative and qualitative data analysis techniques. Quantitative data were analysed using the independent samples t-test, which is one of the relational statistics based on the comparison of two variables, experimental and control groups, and Cohen d values were calculated to determine the effect size. Qualitative data were analysed using descriptive and content analysis. It was concluded that the PTSIA prepared with the research were effective in developing creative and critical thinking skills, which are among the high-level thinking skills of gifted students. The applications were found to be beautiful, interesting, intriguing, and exciting by the students. It was concluded that teachers had positive opinions about the practices. Based on the results obtained from this study, the use of an interdisciplinary approach in teaching practices aimed at developing students' thinking skills will facilitate the acquisition of cognitive thinking abilities and their application to daily life. This approach will enable students to more clearly perceive the relationships between events, facts, and ideas, and learn to establish deeper connections between them by integrating various disciplines and perspectives.
Remixing is a balance between imitation and originality, which gets a lot of attention as an important source of creative behaviors. Exploring the relationship between the Scratch project and its remix would provide a new perspective for understanding users’ creative behaviors. To this end, this study used 20 projects and their 957 remixes as samples to analyze creative behavior in Scratch through quantitative statistics and correlation analysis. Three research questions are addressed: (1) What creative levels are there among the remixes? (2) What relationships are there between the project and its remixes? and (3) What creative trends are there indicated in the remixes? The main results are concluded as follows. First, four creative levels of remixes based on the SOLO taxonomy are found, including feature change, appearance change, element creation, and structure creation. Feature change has the highest sum of remixes, which indicates that most remixes are at a low creative level. Second, the internal characteristics of projects are related to the lower creative level of remix, while the external characteristics are attached to the higher creative level of remix. Finally, the two-level, three-level, and four-level iteration chain of remixes are found, in which remixes with high creativity is more likely to inspire remixes with lower or equal creativity. Based on these results, suggestions for further research and improvement are discussed. This study has important implications for understanding the creative level of remix among users in programming community and guiding users to make valuable remixes.