Developing and validating the game-based creativity protocol and investigating its effectiveness on the social-emotional skills

Abstract

Play as children's work and activity in daily life plays an important role in developing children's creative thinking. Children are born creative, but the creativity of many of them drops around the age of ten, which can be seen as the main factor in formal and informal education environments. The purpose of this research is to develop and validate the game-based creativity protocol and to investigate its effectiveness on the social-emotional skills of primary school students. The current research is applied in terms of its purpose and in terms of mixed method (qualitative-quantitative). The data-based theory method was used to achieve the game-based creativity protocol, and in the second stage, the experimental method was used with pre-test-post-test, with two experimental and control groups. The research community was interviewed in the qualitative section, including experts in the field of creativity, game and community psychology. The statistical population in the quantitative part of the research included students of girls' and boys' primary schools in district 1 of Tehran in 2018, aged 7-9. The data collection tool included a semi-structured interview guide sheet, social-emotional competence questionnaire, and Torrance's creativity questionnaire. To analyze the data in the qualitative part, open, axial and selective coding was used, and in the quantitative part, multivariate covariance analysis test was used. In explaining the findings of this research, we can say According to experts, 15 main components were identified and training sessions were designed based on these 15 components. The results showed that the game-based creativity protocol had an effect on the social-emotional skills of the children in the experimental group and significantly increased those skills. The result is that a game-based creativity protocol can be developed based on the analysis of texts and interviews with experts. Also, the use of game-based creativity protocol in primary school children helps to promote and nurture their creativity and improves the social-emotional skills of primary school students.