The Investigation on Creative Thinking into Projected-Base Programming Course for College Students

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to integrate creative thinking strategies and skills into a project-based programming course for undergraduate students from information engineering and engineering and sciences departments. For creativity training, this study uses Mind map tool in the course to reinforce students’ divergent thinking ability, and for the projects, this study provides Arduino quadcopters and various sensors for students to program their controlled flights in order to enhance students’ programming and convergent thinking abilities. The course is taught to a group of 38 freshmen from an engineering and science department in a university in southern Taiwan. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods, including programming ability test, Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults (ATTA), and expert’s participant observations, are used in this research for evaluating the course performance in a one-group pretest-posttest design. The results in students’ programming ability tests indicate that the programming ability of students is positively and significantly improved by the project-based course. From the after-course surveys and the expert’s participant observations, this study finds students, after hand-on projects, show strong learning interest and motivation. From the ATTA tests, this study can confirm the positive enhancement in students’ creativity after they participate in the creative project-based programming course, but there is no significant difference in the overall creativity performance between the ATTA pre- and post-tests. Suggestions are provided in this study to further strengthen the effectiveness and efficiency of future instruction and investigation in relevant courses.