Informatics in Education

Creativity has emerged as an important 21st-century competency. Although it is traditionally associated with arts and literature, it can also be developed as part of computing education. Therefore, this article -presents a systematic mapping of approaches for assessing creativity based on the analysis of computer programs created by the students. As result, only ten approaches reported in eleven articles have been encountered. These reveal the absence of a commonly accepted definition of product creativity customized to computer education, confirming only originality as one of the well-established characteristics. Several approaches seem to lack clearly defined criteria for effective, efficient and useful creativity assessment. Diverse techniques are used including rubrics, mathematical models and machine learning, supporting manual and automated approaches. Few performed a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed approach regarding their reliability and validity. These results can help instructors to choose and adopt assessment approaches and guide researchers by pointing out shortcomings.

This work highlights the importance of verbal creativity, providing a productive online discourse definition, in which students intertwine convergent and divergent thinking by means of a transactional and controversial dialog. Developing the formulated productive online discourse definition, it is also presented and evaluated, an original scaffolding process designed here to further collaborative knowledge building, during ill-structured problem-solving, focusing on creativity and innovation. Evidence from qualitative online discourse analysis indicated an improvement in the knowledge building processes, and knowledge advancement and deepening after teacher's scaffolding.