Goals
The creativity development research stream aims to find out what features of digital activities are effective at supporting children’s creative thinking and development.
Creativity is a critical life skill for children to develop, and which is related to children’s academic learning in all subjects. In this research stream, we are exploring how children’s creativity can be supported in a digital space through apps.
We have reviewed a sample of commercially available apps that claim to support primary school children’s creativity to assess their quality (based on existing research evidence) and whether app store information such as review ratings or cost relate to their quality. This allows us to see whether apps are well designed to potentially allow for and support children’s creativity.
Of course, children can potentially be creative with any tools (it depends on how, and with whom, they are used). Thus, we are also examining children’s creativity with apps by observing how they engage with the apps. Using a digital drawing app, we are exploring the stages of children’s creative process and how features of the drawing game may impact creative performance and process.
Findings
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Our review of commercially available apps for children which contain keywords about creativity suggests that they are overall not well designed to support children’s creativity. The majority of apps were in the visual arts, whereas other subjects such as languages or Science Technology Engineering and Maths (STEM) were not well represented in the sample of creative apps.
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There are a number of high-quality apps available, for instance coding apps (such as Scratch and ScratchJnr, Programming Zemi, and Grasshopper: Learn to Code), and other creative apps, such as BBC CBeebies Get Creative, SimCity BuildIt, and Toontastic 3D, which were designed to allow for creativity as well as being well designed more broadly.
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App store data (review scores, number of installs, whether the app was free to use or not, and Google Play’s “expert approval” badge) were not predictors of quality in terms of supporting creativity: the expert approval and an app being paid for was only related to how useable (accessible) and ad- and distraction-free the apps were.
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Finding apps with more relevant keywords; fewer and therefore more focused activities; and sourcing them from an independent review website is likely to mean they are better at supporting creativity and learning more generally, rather than relying on results from a keyword search.
List of site pages
