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Videla, Ronnie, Ross, Wendy, Penny, Simon, Parada, Francisco, Sandoval-Obando, Eduardo, Aros, MayBritt, Kausel, Leonie, Cerpa, Carola, Veas, Paulina and Valenzuela, Héctor (2025) Fostering creativity and collaboration in STEAM environments: a 3E cognition approach. Thinking Skills and Creativity. ISSN 1871-1871 (In Press)
This paper explores how creativity and collaboration emerge as embodied, enacted, and environmentally scaffolded (3E) cognitive processes within STEAM education. Drawing on two qualitative case studies conducted in Chile: Designing Fog Collectors and Designing a Smart Trash Bin, the research investigates how students’ learning unfolds through sensorimotor engagement, material manipulation, and technologically mediated collaboration. Using non-participant observation and micro-interviews, the study examines how cognition becomes distributed across bodies, artifacts, and environments in both analog and digital ecologies. Findings from the first case reveal that creativity was enacted through embodied interaction with materials, where students “thought with their hands,” transforming scientific ideas into tangible understanding through collective experimentation and environmental feedback. In contrast, the second case shows a technologically mediated embodiment, in which students extended their cognitive processes through digital tools such as 3D modeling, Arduino programming, and artificial intelligence. Across both contexts, cognition and creativity emerged as ecological and participatory phenomena, grounded in co-regulation and shared sense-making. The study advances the 3E cognition framework as a proof of concept for understanding and designing STEAM learning environments that integrate material, social, and technological dimensions. By operationalizing post-cognitivist theory, the 3E approach offers a transferable qualitative model that bridges theory and practice, demonstrating how creativity and collaboration can be cultivated through ecological, distributed, and relational forms of learning in 21st-century education.
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