Computational thinking development through creative programming in higher education

Abstract Creative and problem-solving competencies are part of the so-called twenty-first century skills. The creative use of digital technologies to solve problems is also related to computational thinking as a set of cognitive and metacognitive strategies in which the learner is engaged in an active design and creation process and mobilized computational concepts and methods. At different educational levels, computational thinking can be developed and assessed through solving ill-defined problems. This paper introduces computational thinking in the context of Higher Education creative programming activities. In this study, we engage undergraduate students in a creative programming activity using Scratch. Then, we analyze the computational thinking scores of an automatic analysis tool and the human assessment of the creative programming projects. Results suggested the need for a human assessment of creative programming while pointing the limits of an automated analytical tool, which does not reflect the creative diversity of the Scratch projects and overrates algorithmic complexity.