In the Eye of the Beholder? Detecting Creativity in Visual Programming Environments
This addresses the need for automated creativity assessment in educational settings, though it is incremental as it adapts existing theories to a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting creativity in students' visual programming projects, such as in Scratch, by developing a computational tool that measures creativity scores, showing that existing metrics fail to capture key aspects like visual artifacts.
Visual programming environments are increasingly part of the curriculum in schools. Their potential for promoting creative thinking of students is an important factor in their adoption. However, there does not exist a standard approach for detecting creativity in students' programming behavior, and analyzing programs manually requires human expertise and is time consuming. This work provides a computational tool for measuring creativity in visual programming that combines theory from the literature with data mining approaches. It adapts the classical dimensions of creative processes to our setting, as well as considering new aspects such as visual elements of the projects. We apply this approach to the Scratch programming environment, measuring the creativity score of hundreds of projects. We show that current metrics of computational thinking in Scratch fail to capture important aspects of creativity, such as the visual artifacts of projects. Interviews conducted with Scratch teachers validate our approach.