SBIR Phase I: Quest-based Creative Thinking Games for Students

The innovation of this SBIR Phase I project will be to design cloud-base social games to enhance the students' creativity and develop a set of computational methods to measure the creativity quotient (CQ) score. Creativity is the first step along the journey towards innovation which leads to commercialization and job creation. SparkTing will design quest-based creative?thinking mobile and browser-based games. The quests will be designed using the well-known pragmatic approach in which the students have to come up with more than one effective way to complete them. This approach is the core of idea-generation (also known as "ideation") which encourages outside-of-the-box thinking and hence, enhances creativity. The project plans to develop a unique way to evaluate the responses using the combination of two methods: (1) Divergent-Thinking approach in which the responses will be evaluated based on fluency, originality and flexibility. This approach will use word or phrase-based associative weight where the algorithm will measure the uniqueness of the associations between words and phrases. Any unique association has a higher weight. (2) Hybrid of Consensual-Assessment approach by others in which the responses are rated and influenced by experts and non-experts to assess the level of creativity. Understandably experts have higher influence. The broader/commercial impact comes from the cloud-based infrastructure that can process large amount of real-time data to measure an accurate CQ score. The cloud infrastructure should support a range of client-side applications on smart-phones, tablets, and browsers. Furthermore, the metrics and modeling approaches will be easily customized for any age group. The initial focus is on students enrolled at the high school and college levels as these groups are beginning to enter the work-force. The initial distribution channel is through a planned partnership with nonprofit organizations such as JA, YEAH, Get-Schooled and NFTE.