It is widely claimed that creativity is becoming increasingly important as Artificial Intelligence takes over more and more administrative roles. According to the OECD, many employers now consider creativity a key skill for success in the workplace and this has been highlighted in recent OECD papers focusing on key competencies of 2030. With advancements of new technologies such as augmented reality (AR), new technological affordances have the capabilities of supporting collaborative creative-processes in new and exciting ways. It is believed that no prior research has focused on AR and teaching for creativity - this research aims to do just that.

This thesis employs a design-based research methodology, aiming to understand how a 3D AR intervention can be designed, tested and evaluated to support collaborative creativity in an art and design context at lower secondary school level. Relevant literature pertaining to creativity is reviewed and a multi-level conceptualisation of creativity that encompasses individual and group-level processes is proposed as a way to guide the research. A review of the field of AR for educational purposes is also conducted and findings suggest that a) more research is necessary in the field of art and design and b) the field lacks appropriate application of methods that identify the processes underpinning observed outcomes, such as increased motivation and academic performance. Both of these limitations are aimed to be addressed by this study through the development and documentation of an open-ended AR 3D modelling creativity task.

Conjecture mapping is used as a method to outline how specific AR affordances relating to the application of interest (Grib) lead to hypothetical learning trajectories derived from theory. These are developed over three iterative cycles of testing and refinement that included 84 participants in Cycle 1, 8 of the same participants in Cycle 2, and 11 of the same participants in Cycle 3. Participants were aged 12- 14 years and from a secondary school based in Gibraltar.

Data were collected from video and audio recordings of group interactions, as well as pre and post- questionnaires pertaining to various psychological factors relevant to creativity. A sociocultural perspective is taken for the analysis of group interactions and a dialogic framework of creativity that includes nonverbal interactions is used in an attempt to uncover a holistic understanding of all modes of communication. Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) and measures of factors such as motivation, risk- taking and creative self-concept beliefs are used in an effort to uncover relationships between constructs in more detail.

Analysis of the multimodal data revealed that the intervention design – which included the AR application ‘Grib’ - effectively helped students to engage in important individual and group creativity- relevant processes like divergent thinking, convergent thinking, intrinsic motivation and social cohesiveness. Several key affordances of the Grib application were identified as helping students engage in these processes and included, textual layering, sketch-to-3D, collaborative functonality and inspection of objects in 3D. Teaching practices identified as supporting students’ creativity-relevant processes included time management, encouragement/reinforcement, reflection of the process, and social cohesion. Based on empirical findings from the study, design principles aimed at practitioners, researchers and designers seeking to support collaborative creative thinking in lower secondary school students are proposed. The study also contributed to a more holistic understanding of creativity by proposing a conceptual framework that drew on and extended numerous models of creativity. It offers a more micro understanding of specific factors that may be responsible for individual and group processes during creative stages. Practical design principles for future practitioners and researchers are also proposed. The above contributions are anticipated to be of practical and theoretical significance to those interested in understanding how individual and group processes might be assembled during similar creative tasks.