On the Influence of Creativity in Basic Programming Learning in a First-Year Engineering Course

摘要

Teaching fundamentals of programming is a complex task that involves student acquisition of diverse knowledge and skills. It is also well known that programming often requires a certain degree of creativity. There are some studies on how to foster creativity with programming, but few of them have analyzed the influence of students' creativity on their performance as programmers. In this paper we present the results of such a study, with a sample of 89 freshmen engineering students. Our results suggest (p < 0.01) that a high level of creativity is correlated with achieving excellence in programming. Creativity is a soft skill which is not currently covered within most engineering curricula, and we conclude that it should be taken into account. Female, diverse thinking students and some disadvantaged groups may benefit from a free-thinking environment in the classroom, in particular during their first-year in college.