For the last few years, coding has been widely introduced in educational settings. This is not surprising considering the growing need for IT specialists worldwide and the potential of this subject to develop skills in a variety of areas, including logical, analytical, and critical thinking, curiosity and innovation, and many more. Such learning potential is explained by the constant need to solve problems in the coding process. Since students often need to find non-standard ways to achieve their goals, coding is a brilliant option to foster their creativity.
Why Creativity Matters?
Recognition starts with proper definitions. When we say “creativity,” the meaning is somewhat vague and elusive in art and literature. However, if it is called “thinking outside of the box,” it seems to have much more value and sounds rather practical and applicable in real life. So creativity is not about making some art objects (although it is obviously involved in it) but about innovation and resourcefulness that is often required in a variety of contexts. It is especially handy when combined with critical thinking, cooperation, communication, understanding tech, and social-emotional growth. It is not only about imagination; it is also about the ways to find solutions in any situation, for example when a student does not have time to finish an essay, they can come up with a solution to pay someone to write my paper and find a proper professional service that can assist in it. Creativity is also an important prerequisite for children when they begin to study, as it gives them an advantage in schooling. In professional life, it is also required in almost every field, from business to psychology and law.
The Creation of Imagination
Software development often makes one’s imagination work at all the process stages. From visualizing to designing the underlying principles of work, it is a vital part of tech skills. There is strong evidence from research that creativity can be boosted in children with the help of coding. While it is often perceived as a whole, creativity can be further divided into several domains. By giving different coding projects and tasks, it is possible to stimulate the development of those. Here are some of the components of creativity and task suggestions, regardless of educational level, that can train them with maximum results:
- Curiosity
It is one of the basic components of creativity. A great way to increase it is to give an algorithmic art task, where students use code to generate visual patterns, geometric shapes, or motion. It will fire them with the desire to experiment and be curious about the result. - Resourcefulness
A brilliant exercise to teach resourcefulness is to give the task to create something but without some ready-made solutions, such as without pre-written functions or modules, so that students have to find ways to write those themselves or substitute them with some other ones. - Non-standard solutions
Integrate coding with robotics and automation tasks. This is often a complex project that requires solving many problems and overcoming hardware and software challenges. Students can design and program robots to perform specific tasks and limited functions. - Analysis
A great method to teach analysis is debugging. Give students the code that doesn’t work and ask them to fix it. This may sometimes be not an easy challenge, but it gives impressive results. - Combining and blending
Game development is perfect for students to train using the existing knowledge and tech skills in a new context. To create a game, students often need to combine the things they already know in a way that leads to the development of something new.
IT and computer science can often be mathematical, logical, and algorithmic with zero involvement of imagination. However, once one starts coding, they realize it is vice versa often; it teaches creativity much more than anything else!
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