Are Undergraduate Creative Coders Clean Coders? A Correlation Study

Abstract

Research on global competencies of computing students suggests that next to technical programming knowledge, the teaching of non-technical skills such as creativity is becoming very relevant. Many CS1 courses introduce a layer of creative freedom by employing open project assignments. We are interested in the quality of the submitted projects in relation to the creativity that students show when tackling these open assignments. We have analyzed 110 projects from two academic years to investigate whether there is a relation between creativity and clean code in CS1 student projects. Seven judges were recruited that evaluated the creativity based on Amabile's Consensual Assessment Technique, while the PMD tool was used to explore code quality issues in the Java projects. Results indicate that the more projects are deemed as creative, the more likely code quality issues arise in these projects, and thus the less clean the code will be. We argue that next to promoting creativity in order to solve programming problems, the necessary attention should also be given to the clean code principles.