Considering that the ICT education was introduced to the school education fields to improve the students’ capability to cope with the information and communication technology that has been quickly developed since the late 20th century, such ICT educ...
Considering that the ICT education was introduced to the school education fields to improve the students’ capability to cope with the information and communication technology that has been quickly developed since the late 20th century, such ICT education brings side effects due to its literacy-focused education trend. So the Ministry of Education is planning to design and conduct a software education to cultivate the students’ computational thinking(CT).
In this regard, this study has developed an NFTM-TRIZ software education program, by combining the software education with the sustainable creativity system (NFTM-TRIZ means ‘continuous Formation Creative Thought-the Theory of Solving Invention Problem’.), which helps students improve their creativity. This study also identified the effect of this program upon the elementary students’ creativity improvement.
The software education operating guideline announced by the Ministry of Education was analyzed, and the Teaching-Learning Plan was developed by combining the NFTM-TRIZ with the operating guideline, based on the analysis. The analysis also involved the following materials: the teaching materials developed by the Korea Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Creativity, the research materials from Edunet, and other major software education related websites and training materials. Using the extracted factors from the analysis, a 10-session amount of software education program for elementary school students was developed.
Using the software education program developed in this study, 10 sessions of courses were provided throughout 4 weeks, targeting a class of fifteen students in N elementary school located in Gyeonggi-do province. TTCT(The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking) - Type A was conducted and the results were tested with the Paired-Samples T-Test, to measure the creativity improvements after taking this course.
The results are as follows.
First, there was a significant improvement in Sophistication and in the Resistance to premature termination, which is a sub-elements of creativity, from the students who underwent the program developed in this study.
Second, there was no significant change in the fluency, originality, and the abstraction factor in the title in the students who underwent the program developed in this study.
Third, the test results showed that there was a significant improvement in the creativity of the students who underwent the program developed in this study.
Along with this study, succeeding research should be made for a more accurate investigation of the effects of proposed NFTM-TRIZ software education program on the elementary school students’ creativity improvement, by identifying the differences between the proposed program and the future software education programs that will be developed in accordance with the guidelines suggested by the Ministry of Education.