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Originally founded by Catt Small and Chris Algoo in 2016, the Game Devs of Color Expo took shape when the two young game developers set out to pioneer a new market for showcasing games made by game creators of color. The first event, a games showcase with roundtable discussions, received rave reviews from attendees.

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SOME NOTES ON ARTS EDUCATION and PROCESS IN CLASS/ASSIGNMENTS

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Sawyer, R. Keith. “The Role of Failure in Learning How to Create in Art and Design.” Thinking Skills and Creativity, Elsevier, 8 Aug. 2018, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871187117302018.

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In most art and design classes, students are presented with projects that typically take two or more weeks to complete. These projects are open-ended and ill-structured to allow students to experience the nonlinear and iterative creative process. A professor of advertising said “They have to learn through experimentation and discovery.” Although open-ended, project assignments are nonetheless guided by carefully designed parameters and constraints. Professors say that without some constraints, students are not challenged; they do what they already know how to do, and they use concepts and tools they have already mastered. Professors invest substantial thought and energy in the design of their project assignments, and in the selection of these constraints. Project constraints R.K. Sawyer Thinking Skills and Creativity 33 (2019) 100527 4 scaffold students as they work through a version of the creative process appropriate to their level of development. Professors often refer to these assignments as “problems” and they say that “problem solving” is an important learning outcome. For example, an architecture professor said she is teaching students “how to come up with creative solutions to problems” and that her goal is “to practice problem solving skills.” An illustration professor told me that his goal was for students to learn how to create “unique and distinctive solutions to the problems within the criteria given.” And yet, unlike math and science education, their use of the word “solution” does not refer to a single correct answer. Professors say that each student must develop their own way to think about the problem, and develop their own unique solution. Professors believe that students have to learn to work with ambiguity or they will not be professionally successful. A professor of graphic design told me: “to be effective in a creative landscape is to know how to operate in a world of ambiguity.” When faced with the ambiguity of open-ended assignments, students must follow their own path through the process. There is not a single obvious way forward: “you never know exactly what you're going to need to do to get to the end” (a professor of first-year foundations).

 

"Students do not yet know how to work within ambiguity. As a result, when working on these open-ended assignments, they often feel frustrated. Professors know that this is likely to happen, and they realize that it can be difficult for the student, but they believe that this frustration benefits learning. A professor of first-year foundations said that students get “frustrated about the lack of structure” but by the end of the course, “they were really glad they’d gone through it.” A professor of graphic design told me “They R.K. Sawyer Thinking Skills and Creativity 33 (2019) 100527 5 should be uncomfortable in the beginning. I tell my students, I want you to be uncomfortable.” A professor of illustration told me that a good learning experience is “typically one that involves frustration” so that the knowledge is “owned”

 

4.5. Responding to requests for more specifics

When students become frustrated while working on these ill-structured problems, they often ask their teacher to provide additional specificity that would reduce the ambiguity they face. Sometimes students ask for additional information even before they begin to work on a problem (Lawson & Dorst, 2009, p. 244). Professors said that it is important to not provide more specific details about the design challenge, because that prevents students from discovering their own way to approach the project. A student’s request for specifics is often driven by a concern for grades. A professor of illustration told me that when a student asks “how to get an A, I can’t tell you that.” So he knows “You’re going to bug the hell out of people.” When describing situations when students ask for more specifics, an architecture professor told me that “it's an incredibly silly question if you're a serious learner”; and that it is a sign that the students “don't want to do the hard work of figuring it out themselves.” The decision not to provide specifics, so that students have to choose a way forward in the presence of ambiguity, is consistent with studies of productive failure in science and math classes. In these studies, students are presented with open-ended problems and are asked to generate multiple potential solutions. Students are used to asking for help from the teacher, and they sometimes ask for help before they even attempt the problem on their own. Research on impasse-driven learning (VanLehn et al., 2003) has found that it is more productive for learning if teachers wait until the learner has reached an impasse, and then provide the learner with guidance to a successful learning outcome. Art and design professors allow students to fail because they believe that it is important in fostering creative success. In contrast, most middle-school math and science teachers tend to think that student failure is detrimental to learning. Instead, they are used to providing assistance, and they find it difficult not to help students when they are frustrated by a problem. As a result, studies of productive failure have found that it is important to advise teachers “to not provide assistance when asked but rather to constantly assure students that it was okay not to be able to solve the complex problems as long as they tried various ways of solving them” (Kapur & Bielaczyc, 2012, p. 52)."