Alissa Antle Awarded SSHRC Grant for research on Creativity, Children, and Tangible User Interfaces

posted: june 30. 2010

Congratulations to SIAT Prof Dr. Alissa Antle and SFU Education Prof Dr. Alyssa Wise on being awarded a SSHRC grant for their research on creativity, children, and tangible user interfaces.

Overview

Divergent thinking is the ability to generate many ideas or solutions. It is essential for scientific discovery, engineering innovation as well as artistic pursuits. Educators have stressed the importance of promoting this type of creativity as an important component of children’s education. We propose that a new way of interacting with computers, called a tangible user interface, has unique characteristics that are well suited to support the development of children’s divergent thinking. We have two theoretically grounded reasons why we think this might be so. This grant would allow us to design, develop and test a prototype computer application which can be used to investigate whether such benefits exist, and if so, what the underlying causes for any observed benefits would be.