CreaCIT – Creative Cross Innovation Tutor for product development is an education development project for the EU Lifelong Learning, transversal programme KA3 (Information and Communications Technologies). The CreaCIT project takes existing best practice in creativity and innovation from the previous EU e-CIT project and combines it with latest research in interactive multiligual online avatars from the EU FP6-IP Salero.
The CreaCIT project aims to design, build and test a creative and cross disciplinary e-learning environment for product development. In the learning environment the students are guided towards creative and lateral thinking to foster commercial innovation and the use of user-centred design in new concepts and products. The products can be material or immaterial, e.g. services. The learning environment is interactive and multilingual (English, French and Spanish).
The main target groups of the project are secondary and tertiary educational levels, students and their teachers. Product development is common between the two education levels and across educational sectors. The level of abstraction of the tasks respects the curricula requirements of each educational level.
CreaCIT enables students to discover the possibilities of creative thinking and innovation, while providing educators with the means to leverage rich interactive learning modules that stimulate personal development and inspire the desire to learn.
The learning environment uses a narrative and constructive approach; the learning environment is a story, and each task is a story. Creativity is embedded in pedagogy and tasks using real world problem solving and product development processes. The reusable learning content provides rich learning material for numerous learning situations.
In addition to the learning environment (LE), the project will provide creativity guides for teachers. The creativity guides assist teachers in lesson planning and illustrating how the LE can integrate with wider pedagogical aims.
Project duration and project phases
The project started on 1st November 2009 and will end on 31st October 2011.
Project phases:
- Content development
- Expert evaluation
- User testing
- Final development
- Forming of the Creative Consortium
- Piloting
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.