The objective of DiARC is to enable professional artists to deliver online training in creativity skills for young people. One output of the programme has been the development of a series of ‘Digital Creativity Cards’ which are intended to:
- assist interactivity and engagement between creative practitioners and young people.
- ensure interaction between learners similar to the one in traditional offline training setting
- enable learners to connect to the topic of creativity and relating to its underlining elements such as: originality, usefulness, innovation, invention/discovery, novelty and solving problems in a unique way
- empower trainers to deliver meaningful online learning experiences.
The cards can be seen here: https://nmct.eu/creativecards/
Experience from our EU partners suggest that these type of cards contribute highly to maintaining a positive atmosphere throughout the whole learning process. They enable learners to feel more connected and related to the training topic on a deeper level.
There are two main features of the cards:
Content: they are dedicated to the topic of creativity. Through the cards learners will be able to connect to creativity through two perspectives:
- Visual through thematic images, related to creativity. This will be the more abstract aspect of each card, which will allow for deeper self-reflection and sharing with other learners. Images allow for learner to connect beyond the level of rational cognition (Points of You cards background research)
- Verbal through words and questions, encouraging learner to analyse one’s creativity strengths, map areas for improvement and exercise one’s creativity powers. There will be cards that will give short creative tasks, as well.
Digital delivery: it will allow for interactive use of the cards in online environment. Our research has showed that most of the cards-type instruments are analogous and there are limited number of cards, developed for training purposes.
Currently, the majority of digital cards solutions are in the field of online entertainment games. We have decided to map the successful mechanisms for digital delivery from the game industry and transfer them in our outputs. We have identified several digital features we have tried to embed in our cards, which can be summarised as follows:
- Shared use – learners can simultaneously play with the deck of cards.
- Flip effect – the cards can be easily placed face up and face down on the screen.
- Movability – the cards can be moved and placed around the screen.
- Ownership and Individuality – in the process, each learner can create one’s own deck and also add one’s own cards. At application stage, we envisage the feature of user changing design only for the word elements of the cards. The visual redesign will be complicated due to the strict copyright issues related to using online images.