STEAM Education for Enhancing Creativity in Packaging Design

Background The creative development of packaging design, using the STEAM teaching method and combined with Guilford (1950)’s creative design, was synthesized into a teaching model named “CREATE.” Each stage of the model included learning management, following the STEAM Education ideas (Yakman & Lee, 2012) that integrated science, technology, engineering, mathematics and arts links in each step. The principles of Structural Packaging and Creating Packaging with this system enabled students to design packaging with an imaginative form, an exotic shape, which required bending and deforming at various angles. The integrated design technique, allowed designers to develop a large variety of shapes. For packaging, this developed the ability for design in the long-term. Methods The population consisted of 120 second-year students of the Industrial Craft Design Program at Thammasat University, Thailand. We used purposive selection to sample 30 subjects. In the experiment, we used these tools: 1) CREATE model for teaching in the subject of “Creative Packaging Design” 2) Lesson Plan 3) Test of Creative Thinking. Data was collected three times - before studying (Pretest: 1), after studying (Posttest: 2) and in a follow-up phase (Follow up: 3) - to study the effects of creativity with repeated measure ANOVA. Results The mean of the repeated measurements for the creative score of packaging design from the ANOVA multivariate test was significantly less than the target significance level (p<0.05). This showed that the independent variable (i.e., the practice score from using our STEAM method) affected the dependent variable (i.e., the score assigned for creativity in the student assignment) submitted in the Packaging Design course. The posttest (Posttest: 2) scores were significantly higher than the pretest scores (p<0.05) and the scores two weeks after graduation (Follow up: 3) were also higher than the pretest scores (p<0.05). Thus, retention of the key ideas taught in the course, was high. Furthermore, the posttest and follow up phase scores were not significantly different, thus confirming good retention. Conclusions We studied creativity in packaging design of students using our CREATE Model for teaching in computer graphic design courses. Each step of the teaching model applied STEAM Education for students to use the concepts in a scientific process, combined with the theory of packaging design. Key aspects of our approach were the exchange of ideas among students, the activities designed to encourage creativity and generally enjoying ‘thinking outside the box’. so that learners strengthened their ability to design creative packaging, could develop packaging designs in a variety of formats and retain learned concepts.