E-learning Promotion: Effects of Physical Effort and Age on Creativity

Creativity is usually associated with painters, poets, and other individuals who create works of art on a daily basis. This is especially true for creativity in eLearning, as eLearning professionals have the opportunity to produce powerful eLearning experiences that inspire, enlighten, and engage our audience. Given that physical actions and cognition are often intertwined in everyday life, the present study has assessed the concurrent effects of physical activity (hand squeeze) on convergent creative problem-solving.in order to find out a possible new way for people of all ages to learn knowledges effectively while simultaneously promote the productivity of e-learning. Twenty middle-aged Chinese participants conducted a compound remote associates (CRA) task online, a Chinese version of the Remote Associate Test (RAT) while squeezing a hard or soft stress ball under different conditions. They performed significantly worse on the CRA when they exerted hard squeeze on the stress ball as compared to when they squeezed the soft stress ball, suggesting that concurrent physical action impairs creativity. More interestingly, age seems to be positively related to convergent creativity in that the CAR performance increased significantly with age, which was largely driven by the significant correlation between CRA performances and age under the hard squeeze, but not under soft squeeze. In summary, the present study has demonstrated that creative problem-solving ability decreases under simultaneous hand squeeze, but increases with age.