The College of Fine & Performing Arts will again be offering ARTP 270, Computational Creativity as an online course this spring. It is three credits, ACE 7 and serves as an elective for the Digital Humanities, Informatics and Music Technology Minors as well as a studio elective for Art majors. This course was first offered in the Fall of 2017.
The core of this course is a suite of Computational Creativity exercises which combine computational thinking (logical, methodical thinking) and creative thinking (flexible, imaginative thinking) to make students better problem solvers in any discipline. Students also hone their collaborative and process skills.
This course has no prerequisites and is open to anyone. While aimed at lower division students, there is ample opportunity for upper division students to push themselves and these students have also benefitted from the course.
The course exercises are based on principled, thoughtful designs, revised numerous times after actual classroom deployments, and have been shown though evidence-based research (funded by the NSF) to improve learning and performance in computing. One of our exercises was recently recognized by a national award for excellence (one of just four) by NCWIT, the National Center for Women & Information Technology. This award recognizes faculty who employ teaching practices that better engage students, especially women and underrepresented groups. Our research on this online course and its positive impact on student learning has also been accepted for publication by SIGCSE, the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education.
Of particular note is the final project, where students have to use computational and creative thinking to design and document a “tool” to solve a real-life problem of their choosing. Students’ innovative responses included an ice-melting shoe, a meditation mask, a five-minute hair styler and a (beneficial) backseat driver.