The mechanics of creative cognition: Orchestrating the productive interplay of procedural and conceptual knowledge in STEM education

As a reaction to the growing economical, ecological and societal demands on education innumerous efforts and programs have been initiated throughout the educational chain to improve the quality of teaching and learning in the STEM field. On that background we sketch a framework to foster creative engagement in learning to promote scientific inquiry and modeling processes. In the theoretical part the article presents a dualistic perspective on the grounding of creative cognition in concrete experience, highlighting the productive and reflexive interplay of procedural and conceptual knowing. Their entanglement is pivotal to successful knowledge construction and application in science and technology. The ‘mechanics’ of creativity is elaborated exemplarily in a project based learning sequence that starts from investigating and modeling elastic forces as a basic paradigm of creative model construction. The creative part refers to conceptual expansions of the elastic spring model that assist in modeling emergent mechanical properties in hard and soft condensed matter. With additional moderate instructional input this knowledge is productive in creating basic models of the self-organized dynamics of biomolecular systems that orchestrate life at the cellular level. The sequence demonstrates how the interplay of hands-on experience and conceptual modeling can promote near and far transfer.