Detecting creativity in an open ended geometry environment

Creativity is a dynamic process which generates ideas that are both novel and of value. However there is little understanding in what drives creativity in students and how to help teachers or education experts to detect creative thinking. This paper begins to address this gap by providing a platform and experiments for studying how creative outcomes can ensue over time. The platform is an open ended environment for creating geometrical shapes that supports exploration and trial and error. We show that participants exhibit diversity in their usage patterns in the system, and in particular, some exhibiting 'creative leaps' in which they move from creating a sequence of shapes in one category to another, new category. We designed a visualization tool that aids understanding in detecting these aspects in students' work. We provide a basic computational model that is able to predict whether a student will create a new shape at a given point in time. The impact of this work is in beginning to provide tools for promoting creativity in students and directing their interactions in a way that facilitates the creative process.