Adapting Rewards to Encourage Creativity
Frank Grove, Noah Jorgenson, Bradley James Brummel, Sandip Sen, Rose Gamble · IGI Global eBooks · 2011
Creativity drives innovation and improves the quality of products, problem solving skills, information technology solutions and entrepreneurship. Curriculum standards for CS education typically lack the emphasis and coverage to promote or encourage creative approaches to Software Engineering, focusing on technological solutions rather than innovative design. As a result, creativity is not directly rewarded. This chapter discusses the development of a multi-agent system to apportion rewards for creative contributions to collaborative and group problem solving among students in a software projects course. Encouraging creativity in a classroom team environment, especially for software development, needs a collaboration framework that combines idea management with a motivating reward system. Their multi-agent reward system works directly with the idea capture and visualization portion of SEREBRO, a Web application that combines social networking with software product development tools to foster creativity. The authors discuss the multi-agent reward system and an initial evaluation of its use in a computer science course.