The SEREBRO Project: Fostering Creativity through Collaboration and Rewards

Software Engineering is a highly creative endeavor that challenges Computer Science (CS) students to establish an innovative vision and to craft an outstanding product. Curriculum standards for CS education typically lack creative approaches to Software Engineering, focusing on technological solutions rather than innovative design. Accountability for and contribution to creative initiatives are therefore not part of grading methods in typical Software Engineering courses. In this paper, we introduce a unique framework to foster creativity within an asynchronous, interactive, and graphical environment that tracks the team’s product understanding through the phases of the Rational Unified Process for software engineering. We incorporate a layered, multiagent system to apportion rewards for creative contributions that correspond to theories of creativity based on external motivation.