Mindmap Tool for the Creative Programming Design

• Main Authors: Yu-LinKuo, 郭育麟
• Other Authors: Tzone-I Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/54012145012366976139

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 工程科學系 === 103 === Creative thinking is highly regarded in recent years as an essential for college students, and has been strongly promoted in various courses. Mind Maps is a structured divergent thinking tool based on the images, which can be used by a solo person to cultivate creative thinking. Computer programming can solve problems, but many learners are limited by their ability or learning environment, resulting in uncreative or ineffective programs that hence destructive to their learning motivation. To see whether creative thinking can assist learners in doing better programming, this study first builds a Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) platform that combines several divergent thinking tools and operates in compliance with creative problem-solving mode and then uses its mind map tool in two experiments, in which learners try to use the tool to create creative applications. Experiment participants are 51 students who attend a university programming design course. They are divided into an experimental and a control group. Every participant, after browsing some open data from government, doing creative development on these data, and integrating applicable ideas for programming, has to decide their own application for the experiments. In the creative development stage, experimental group uses mind-map tool to do their creative thinking, while control group uses only simple list to note their created ideas. After the generation and aggregation of ideas is complete, every participant selects one of the applicable results as the target application for implementation. They put pseudo codes for their application, then convert the pseudo code into C++ codes. The result of the experiment indicates that the experimental group, using the mind map tool, performing significantly better than the control group in the assessment, including fluency, flexibility, and originality, of creativity. This concludes that, in this study, the mind-map tool can help learners brainstorm and come up with more ideas in the creative development stage and therefor can advance their creative programming design ability.