Creative Assessment

My idea for the sandbox assessment, Story with Required Content, started with something a coworker does in our Networking and Cyber Security program. He gives students Play-Doh and asks them to create something that reminds them of an IT term or piece of hardware. They then have to explain the connection. When I saw the assessment technique of presenting students with an image and asking them to make a connection to it, I immediately thought of his activity. I wanted to take the same basic idea and apply it to game design.

In Story with Required Content, students are shown five unrelated images and must create a storyline for a video game that meaningfully uses all five. A quick mention does not count. Each image has to affect the characters, setting, conflict, objective or progression of the game. If the item is removed, it should alter the story.

What I like most about this assessment is the balance between constraints and freedom. Students are working inside a box, but it is a very loose box. They do not choose the five required elements, but almost everything else is theirs to decide. It reminds me of cooking competition shows where contestants are handed several strange ingredients and somehow have to turn them into one good dish. The restriction is part of what creates the opportunity for creativity.

That also makes the assessment more authentic to game design. A game designer rarely gets unlimited freedom. Customers, teammates, budgets and technical requirements all place constraints on a project. Wiggins and McTighe describe authentic performance tasks as requiring students to work within realistic constraints and use judgment and innovation instead of simply following a predetermined process (2005, pp. 153-154). The five images simulate that problem on a small scale. Can a student take requirements they did not choose and still produce a quality game concept?

At the same time, I do not want this to become an activity that is creative simply because it is fun. Wiggins and McTighe warn about activities that are “hands-on without being minds-on,” meaning students may be engaged without necessarily demonstrating important learning (2005, p. 16). That is why the requirement that each image meaningfully affects the storyline matters. I am not assessing whether students can write something entertaining. I am looking for evidence that they understand the important pieces of a game storyline and can apply them under constraints.

This also connects to Kohn’s argument about grades and intellectual risk. He argues that when students are focused on grades, they may prefer easier tasks and avoid unnecessary intellectual risks (Kohn, 2011). That is the opposite of what I want from this assessment. There is no single correct story hiding in my answer key. Students can be weird, funny, serious or completely unexpected as long as they can make all five requirements work.

My current thinking about creative assessment is that creativity does not require removing the boundaries. Sometimes the right boundaries are exactly what make students think more creatively while still giving me meaningful evidence of what they understand.

References

Kohn, A. (2011, November). The case against grades. Educational Leadership. https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-grades/

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). ASCD.

Creative Assessment