The C2Learn case study offers insights into innovative ways in which games can be used in education to foster co-creativity, whereby students play and collaborate to generate valuable, disruptive new ideas to address problems they define.

How can we foster creativity in education? How can we use student-engaging games in this effort? How can we, as educators, design learning activities to this end? How can we involve our students as creative agents in this design?

This case study explores synergies of creativity and digital games in today’s schools, aiming to familiarize educators from various subject areas with concepts and examples of practice related to game-based learning as a vehicle promoting creativity, including creative thinking, in and around schools, in the intersection of formal and informal learning activities (curricular, cross-curricular, extra-curricular).

Participants learn about the original concept of co-creativity in learning, according to which learners, individually as well as mainly collaboratively and also communally, come up with novelty, new ideas. These new ideas:

• Have emerged through asking ‘what if’ and ‘as if’ questions and through the use of disruptive techniques resulting in re-framing
• Have emerged from shared ideas and actions in an immersed dialogic rather than hierarchical pedagogical environment
• Are captured or selected because they matter to the community and have a valuable impact on it.

And in all this, learners take into account the impact of that novelty on the individual, collaborative and communal dimensions of their community.

To foster co-creativity, the C2Learn case study proposes games and methods with which teachers can design playful learning experiences consisting of Creative Quests, Missions, and Challenges. In a Quest, learners set out on a journey towards specified goals. Within a Quest, in a number of Missions learners engage themselves in actions with specific objectives contributing towards achieving the goals of the Quest. In the heart of each Mission lies a Problem; one with no obvious ‘correct’ answers, e.g. a dilemma. To address the Problem, learners choose one or more Challenges to pursue. The Challenges are small games and playful activities that get learners to play with words, images, and emotions in order to generate their own valuable, inspiring, disruptive new ideas addressing the Problem at hand.

The content of the case study aims to inspire participants to become creative practitioners in their professional settings, designing a concrete educational scenario involving the use of C2Learn games and activities.

The C2Learn case study is based on the outcomes of the C2Learn project.