This semester I am teaching a course titled Human Creativity x AI in Education. We have 19 students in the class, split into 5 groups. (And yes though I love prime numbers, having one more participant would have been better). Each week one of the groups will document and write a blog post about what we have been upto each week. Below is the first such report.

Note: The post has not been edited by me in any way, except for minor stylistic changes to fit the design of this website.

Without further ado… here we go.

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Week 1: Creativity x AI

by Bret Hovell, Karina Luna, Priyal Vasaiwala.

First Day of Class @ Creativity Commons, ASU | Photo credit: Priyal Vasaiwala

15 Minutes, Infinite Ideas

Feeling tense? 

How might the people around you know?

Perhaps your shoulders are tight, lifted high enough to touch your ears. Maybe you’re rubbing your temples, bouncing your foot, pulling out your hair. 

Why are you so tense anyway? Is it because you only have 15 minutes to come up with three ways to visually express the abstract idea of tension in front of your new professor and all these brilliant classmates? 

Or maybe you got assigned other challenging ideas like emergence, duality or resonance?

Welcome to Creativity x AI in Education

Over the course of the Spring 2025 semester we will explore how AI can have a multiplying effect on our own creativity and the creativity of those we serve. 

But first, that ice-breaking activity that allowed us to contemplate the imperfectness of language and the core challenge of expressing the ideas in our head. 

Language can mean so many different things to so many different people. 

Maybe when you were thinking about tension you weren’t imagining a knot in your muscles where your neck meets your shoulder. Instead, you might have been thinking of the concept in physics — picturing how an elevator works, or how the Golden Gate Bridge stays standing. Or perhaps you were remembering musical tension, the buildup of unresolved chords creating a sense of anticipation. 

Words and language have many meanings. It takes work to think and communicate clearly.

Or, maybe you have a very clear thought in your head of what you’d like to express about one of these high-concept nouns: a dazzling depiction of emergence, or a sublime take on duality. But how are you going to get that brilliant idea out of your head? And out of your head in a way that other people can use it, build on it, grow it and, most importantly, learn from it and teach it to others? 

We had some successes. Team Emergence employed the dramatic arts. Team Duality borrowed from pop culture. Team Resonance…definitely had the most difficult challenge. 

It was hard. And that was the point. 

The only way to get good ideas is to get a lot of ideas— Linus Pauling

The Semester Ahead

A chunk of the first class was devoted to introductions and the mechanics of how things will work. Quote of the day: “We’ll figure it out!”

But we also had the apparently rare pleasure of a Punya lecture, laying out the conceptual framework that will undergird most of our work. 

There are seven (or 13!) thinking tools that support creativity and problem solving: perceiving, patterning, abstracting, embodied thinking, modeling, playing and synthesizing. 

These creativity-enhancing tools do not just apply to artistic expression (the realm typically thought of as “creative”), but to the sciences, mathematics, engineering, medicine — everything really. Creativity is about bringing something new into the world. And we need to teach more of that, to ourselves and to our students. 

In this class we will develop a thorough understanding of these tools, how to apply them and why they matter. And then we will explore how generative artificial intelligence can enhance our creativity and help us employ the tools. 

These AI platforms, Punya argued, can help us generate ideas. Which we need. We need lots of ideas. 

The results of lots of ideas may be difficult for some of us who are more perfectionism-minded. Punya advises that in this idea creation stage we need to fight the urge for perfectionism. On final projects we can let our perfectionism-freak-flags-fly. But it’s okay to have less than perfect ideas when creating lots of ideas. 

As Punya reminded us: If you can’t take a risk in a classroom, where can you take a risk? He encouraged us to push boundaries and to lean into our passions and backgrounds. It’s “okay to fail” in this class. 

What a luxurious place to learn. 

But Wait!

Isn’t academia totally freaked out right now about people using AI to complete their assignments? And yet here we are taking a class in which we’ll be using AI to complete our assignments?

What gives?

Well, this isn’t going to be a typical class, to say the least. Punya advises that we can use AI in our work, but we have to be willing to stand by every single word of it. We cannot blame an AI platform for something that is wrong or incoherent. In the end it is our work with each of our names on it. 

Remember: AI is a smart, drunk, biased intern, albeit a supremely confident one. 

Check its work. 

And have a great semester!

Additional Resources

Punya also shared some of his personal creativity catalysts: 

• A game called Monument Valley 3 (the music is great — wear headphones!)
• Harry G. Frankfurt’s essay On Bullshit
• Alexandra Horowitz’s book On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes