Affective Modeling of Users in Cognitive Elements Exercise Program for Design Creativity Enhancement

As an effort to provide students the opportunity in enhancing design creativity in a personalized adaptive manner, an exercise program that address cognitive elements of creativity has been devised so that personalized needs in specific elements could be addressed. Being an exercise for creativity, the contents are rather unusual as students first deal with the program. Learning involves both cognitive and affective aspects of learning users in interacting with learning contents and interface. A learning user model includes assessment information as well as understanding on learners both static and dynamic characteristics. While cognitive aspects of a learning user would be rather static, affective aspects are dynamic in its nature. In the context of computer-assisted learning context of creative design capabilities, affective modeling of learners is being done using self-reporting format. Affective elements composed of joy, acceptance, fear, surprise, sadness, dislike, anger, and interest are used in the affective modeling in a simple training exercises for cognitive elements of creativity. While students conduct the exercises, they are asked to self-report their affective state using a simple diagram. Also, the entire exercise session is captured with students all activities including their facial expressions. From the images of learners captured during their activities, a human coder will also be able to develop the affective model. We conducted an experiment with students in interdisciplinary, integrated design where the exercise program for cognitive creativity elements with self-reporting of affective states was assigned between two simple conceptual design tasks. The experiment result indicates that the learning effects for fluency, flexibility and originality have been significant. We expect this research will help understand the affective state change and its relation with learning progression in creativity education.