Designing educational software inline with the creative learning process: Just how important is the preparation phase?

A question gaining widespread interest in education today is ‘how can learning tasks be structured to encourage creative thinking in the classroom?’ This has a number of implications for the design of educational software. Numerous scholars have suggested that the processes of ‘learning’ and ‘creativity’ share many similarities. Extending upon this a generative framework of creative learning is presented here. This framework exists as a design support tool to aid the design of educational software. In order to demonstrate how this framework can be applied in practice, a music composition program called ‘SoundScape’ has been developed in accordance with the framework. This paper reports upon study conducted with SoundScape within a school with 96 children aged 11. The study focused upon two objectives, firstly, identifying differences in explicitly supporting the “preparation” phase of the creative process as opposed to not explicitly supporting the “preparation” phase. Secondly, the study compared differences in using real-world metaphors at the interface compared to using visual abstract representations at the interface.