Measuring Creativity of Elementary School Students in the Context of a Coding and Storytelling Intervention

Abstract

The presented study is a pilot to validate a test instrument in the context of an intervention in the areas of creativity and algorithmic thinking for elementary school children. The aim is to generate a test instrument that measures creativity and basic programming skills and also to check the feasibility and quality of the intervention created in order to achieve high-quality results in the future main study, which is to be carried out with a larger number of children from first to fourth grade. A total of 16 fourth graders from an elementary school in Germany participated as part of an out-of-school learning day. At the beginning of this day, they completed a pretest, after which they learned about the use of floor robots and basic algorithmic skills in a playful and creative way in an intervention lasting approximately 90 minutes. Finally, a post-test was administered to measure learning gains. The data collected shows that the algorithmic thinking test instrument measures algorithmic thinking adequately and shows significant learning gains for the children overall. It was also possible to classify the children into four groups according to their competencies with respect to convergent and divergent thinking, of which one group (with high scores in convergent and divergent thinking) can be classified as “the creative group”. In addition, the data shows indications of connections between creativity and algorithmic thinking, although these can only be evaluated descriptively and need to be confirmed with a larger sample.