Modeling Creativity in Visual Programming: From Theory to Practice

Promoting creativity is considered an important goal of education, but creativity is notoriously hard to define and measure. In this paper, we make the journey from defining a formal creativity and applying the measure in a practical domain. The measure relies on core theoretical concepts in creativity theory, namely fluency, flexibility, and originality, We adapt the creativity measure for Scratch projects. We designed a machine learning model for predicting the creativity of Scratch projects, trained and evaluated on ratings collected from expert human raters. Our results show that the automatic creativity ratings achieved by the model aligned with the rankings of the projects of the expert raters more than the experts agreed with each other. This is a first step in providing computational models for describing creativity that can be applied to educational technologies, and to scale up the benefit of creativity education in schools.