Constructionism, Creativity and Virtual Worlds

Constructionism places an emphasis on the process of creating personally meaningful artefacts in order to explore, test and extend understanding. To achieve this, learners engage in a creative process in which they develop skills, generate and evaluate ideas and share their knowledge and understanding through the artefacts that they create. This paper explores this process through a distributed constructionist learning experience in a non-goal orientated virtual world with 24 learners. The stages of the creative process identified by Shniederman are used as a theoretical lens to examine codes and categories generated through constant comparative analysis of data, along with the original interviews, artefacts and learners’ reflections. The findings identify ways in which the features of the technology, the built environment and design of the learning experience influenced the creative process.