Applying creativity in CS high school education - criteria, teaching example and evaluation Romeike, R. (2007). Applying creativity in CS high school education - criteria, teaching example and evaluation. Proceedings of the 7th Baltic Sea Conference on Computing Education Research ( pp ). Koli National Park, Finland. Nov , Presenter: Feng Chia-Yen Advisor: Chen Ming-Puu Date: November 25, 2009

Introduction (1/2)  The role of CS  to provide the students with a positive attitude towards IT systems and a confident, responsible use of IT in the information society, and to allow the students an insight into the science itself.  CS has to deal with problems  low motivation, decreasing interest, low participation of female students and the transfer of a wrong image of CS in schools.  A key factor for engaging with programming -> creativity  Defining creativity-> previous research-> describe criteria for designing creative CS lessons->presented and applied in a lesson example for introductory programming->The evaluation and the results are discussed.

Introduction (2/2)  Two aspects of creative achievements ( Boden, 1990)  Historical creativity (h-creativity) that are novel and original in the sense that nobody has had them before.  Psychologically creative (p-creativity). Something that is fundamentally novel to the individual  In this paper-> creative  if it leads to personal new, unique and useful ideas, solutions or insights (cp. Runco & Chand 1995, Kaufman & Sternberg 2007).

Creativity in CS Education  The spiral cycle of Creativity (Resnick, 2007)  imagining, creating, playing, sharing, reflecting, and back to imagining.  Computers have been found to be a fertile tool for supporting creativity. Many articles address IT support for creative practice.  The role of creativity in CS from two perspectives.  creativity is essential to CS.  CS makes it easy to be creative.  Formulated creativity criteria will help teachers in planning lessons and regarding the creativity potential that CS offers.

Criteria for Creative CS Lessons  Requirements for the Subject  Relevance  problem solving and the creation of a product  Requirements for Tasks  Subjective novelty  Openness in possible results, approaches and solution methods  Application of concept knowledge  Inspiration  Student-oriented Requirements  Identification (meaningful to the student), Originality  Requirements for the Teaching Environment  Experimenting, Freedom in time, Climate of diversity, Teacher as a coach (The teacher needs to diminish the leading role of transferring knowledge)

Introduction to Programming by Applying Creativity Criteria (1/2)  The Creativity Framework  1.Motivation for New Concepts of Programming animating their name or a story of their everyday life or imagination, and the development of games that can be played by them.  2.Laying out the Fundamentals The introduction of new content was done by applying a building block metaphor.  3.Inspiration It is essential for a creative lesson to provide an inspiration to the students, generally by showing an example program or brainstorming about possibilities.

Introduction to Programming by Applying Creativity Criteria (2/2)  The Creativity Framework  4.Challenging the Students Challenging the students was done with open-ended tasks with variable solution complexity and independent working time for the students.  5.Presentation and Reflection Presentation of the work included presentation and discussion of ideas, problems and strategies. At the end of the course every student was asked to develop his own game, with the only condition being that all of the learned concepts should be applied.  Chose Scratch as the CS tool-> supports the idea of fostering creativity in CS classes.

Evaluation (1/3)  Method  Course A: use Scratch-> the creativity-teaching  Course B: a ‘traditional’ problem-solving teaching  Evaluation two questions  If creativity is explicitly considered, what effect does this have on the students’ motivation, interest, and picture of the school subject of CS?  What is the impact on the students’ task understanding and achievement?

Evaluation (2/3)  The questionnaire was structured the following way:  The questionnaire was answered by the students before and after the 4-week (11-hour) course. 1.computer science lessons in general, e.g. “CS lessons are fun/interesting/creative” 2.Questions about difficulty, amount of content and appropriateness of the last teaching unit 3.Appraisal of teaching techniques, methods and tools. e.g. “I could discover new things”, “I have the feeling I learned something” 4.Questions about the perceived learning outcome success of the individual and of the learning group

Evaluation (3/3)  The test following the course contained two sections:  Theoretical Definition and characteristics of algorithms Describing concepts of programming and giving an example  Practical Explaining and optimizing two programs presented on paper Implementing a program to a given problem Implementing a program for a self-chosen task, applying all used concepts

Results (1/5)  Motivation, Interest, Picture of CS  Interesting 29% → 93%, creative 36% -> 93%, experiment 14% ->73%  The students’ picture of computer science lessons changed positively.  the girls’ interest was also raised and they enjoyed the tasks.

Results (2/5)  Understanding, Achievement  In the topic of programming, due to the many ways of presenting the students’ results and achievements, the classroom climate was a more positive one->motivate the students’ persistence and desire to understand when they encountered problems.  The problems many CS and programming courses have with female students’ achievements, this seems to be an encouraging outcome.

Results (3/5)  Questions about the lessons (Students’ answers about the teaching methods, tasks, and lessons)  All students considered the presentation of the learning content as understandable.  the students learned most by working at projects (60%) and dealing with the tasks (60%) in contrast to explanations of the teacher (13%).

Results (4/5)  Questions about the topic  less then 1/3 the students stated that the topic was dealing with issues out of everyday life and only 43% of the students think they can use the learned knowledge in future->by the teacher  Given the strength of real-life contexts as a major source of motivation 80% very interesting, 87% learned something, 73% had fun with this topic.  The topic as being connected to everyday life – the tasks and the creative practice were motivating enough for the students to enjoy and learn.

Results (5/5)  Comparison with the control group  group A improved a lot while group B on average remained stable at the grades they had before.  the boys of group B improved their grades while the girls deteriorated.  the girls of group A improved their grades considerably more then the boys.

Conclusion  CS lessons based on a set of creativity to conducted teaching unit in introductory programming fulfilled the expectations: the students enjoyed the lessons, the learning objectives were met and the students’ picture of CS improved.  The students’ efforts were concentrated and intrinsically motivated.  Female students performed very well in the course and could engage in tasks they enjoyed.  That creativity can and should be applied in the long run in programming courses and can possibly serve as a principle in other fields of CS as well.