Structures, Frameworks and Assessments for Student Exercises for Creative Thinking in Design

Students of engineering and design would benefit from an improved understanding of their own and each others' creativity. We can exercise students by setting challenges, and asking them to evaluate their work, for novelty and quality. This is to help them to develop and become familiar with their own creative processes; but also to appreciate the different styles of creative thinking that others can have, the properties that society generally values in creative design, and how their own work may be appreciated. In order to achieve this in higher education, it is useful to develop frameworks in which student work can be assessed for creativity in particular, and to offer ways in which work can be assigned to students so that they may produce design concepts and then peer-assess them for their mutual benefit. In this paper we summarise how creativity is evaluated or measured by psychologists and educationalists, as well as more recent proposals by researchers in the new field of computational creativity. We consider how these notions may be applied in the classroom context, to evaluate the creativity of student work. The suggestions are illustrated with our recent assignments to students to produce and assess creative design concepts for serious games. A general framework is proposed, which has been used in two universities for game design students.