Presentation “Understanding the Causal Origins of Creativity – A View from Computational Curriculum Studies”

Is human creativity the product of exceptional individuals, or does it emerge from the decentralized, cumulative processes of cultural evolution? The way we answer this question has deep implications for how we design school curricula—especially in an era where generative AI challenges traditional notions of originality and expertise. In this talk, I draw from the emerging field of Computational Curriculum Studies (CCS) to examine competing causal models of creativity and their influence on educational design. I begin by contrasting agential and selectionist accounts of creative innovation, positioning them within a broader evolutionary framework. To reconcile these perspectives, I introduce the concept of Integrated Causal Reasoning (ICR)—a systems-level approach that models creativity as arising from the dynamic interaction of cognitive, social, and technological processes. From this perspective, CCS serves as a framework for both designing curriculum to foster computational thinking—including pattern recognition, abstraction, generalization, and modeling—and for critically applying computational tools to analyze and iteratively improve curriculum structures themselves. These metaconceptual competencies are not only essential to programming or AI literacy, but lie at the heart of human-machine co-creative capacities. I explore how students can engage with creativity as a cultural and epistemic phenomenon by building causal models and curricular resources that trace the emergence of scientific and technological innovation across species and societies. This dual focus of CCS—on fostering creativity through computational thinking, metaconceptual competencies, and reimagining curriculum as a participatory design space—offers a powerful yet complex landscape for cultivating creativity at individual, collective, and global scales.