This semester, I asked students to reflect upon their experiences of going through the creative process. I felt really rewarded to learn how diverse lessons they had from this course! Here I share some quotes from students anonymously.
It’s been one of my favorite classes I’ve taken at VT! It was really refreshing and rewarding to be able to build our own project with our team, rather than be told what to do, but also regularly having helpful feedback from the professor and other students in the class.
This class has been one of the most interesting and fun classes I’ve taken my four years at VT. We had a lot of freedom in what we wanted to do and really enjoyed seeing the projects that the other teams did as well. I really appreciated the class overall as it encompasses almost all the aspects of computer science and we were able to create an actual product in our 5 months in school.
We also learned a lot about iterative design and user testing. For our project, our user testers gave feedback which we utilized in the later stages of our prototype. The feedback was useful in helping us understand ways we can make the video game more intuitive and user friendly.
I didn’t always have to look at a sheet with requirements and I just went off with what I wanted to code. It was refreshing to say the least and I’m glad I got to experience this before I graduated.
Frankly, at the beginning of the class, “creative computing” is still a vague concept. And the fact that no one was interested in my initial ideas disappointed me in February when we formed teams. At that time, I considered the mix of creativity and computing as some installation art listed in modern art exhibitions. So I focused only on those exhibition pieces over the more practical stuff in the ideation stage. And after reiterating my experiences and the things I did at the finding collaborators stage, I realized that there are so many things I should’ve done better if I wanted to attract others to like my idea. I should communicate better and more actively to show my idea’s potential and practical use. And always, I should not be stubborn to stop myself from updating my initial plan based on the feedback from others.
I really enjoyed seeing other groups’ creative projects in class, and I had the opportunity to give them advice.
I really enjoyed working with my team. I didn’t have as much difficulty to stay motivated for this class as I did other classes I took, and I think working on a project I was genuinely interested in with such a good and talented group of people helped a lot with that.
Getting good, constructive feedback allows for designers to see the oversights they have made in design and improvements they can make, as well as the things that are already going well, allowing for more informed and well-throughout design decisions to be made.
Before this class, my perspective on creativity had only been one-dimensional. I thought something creative had to be either a work of art or a uniquely crafted musical piece. However, within the first couple of weeks of this class, this perception had altered significantly. Games, software programs, social media applications, and food delivery apps are all creative tools that are useful to users in one way or another. Creative tools exist to either solve a user’s problem or enhance their way of thinking for either entertainment or beneficial purposes.
The ideation stage of the development process was very fun and interesting to hear everyone’s unique perspectives of the three themes we were given in this course.
A single creative idea can take hundreds of hours to complete. But, in the course I learned that creativity doesn’t have to stop at the big idea. And it’s better if it doesn’t.