Young peoples’ creative production combines such activities as analysis of existing forms and genres; participation in processes including drafting, journaling, and modeling; sustained work on a particular idea; and mentor critique. In our work with a variety of settings, we have found that young artists’ progress depends on their engagement in all of these tasks, and that analysis of this work depends on looking across and through these varied practices. While typical descriptive analyses of such processes move forward, we have found that moving bidirectionally—from final product backward and from initial idea forward—better helps us to understand participants’ learning. We use examples from two creative production contexts to describe a technological tool developed for bidirectional artifact analysis by outlining its features, affordances, and constraints.
