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Good article/videos. It made me think of the programming course I'm currently doing. The instructor is giving me all his knowledge and techniques, and surely I'll develop my own, but his teachings will form the foundation on which all future developments will be based. Is this plagiarism, or is this simply a passing of skills from one to another, so that they grow and become greater? At the start, the Hello World apps will look identical for all students, but as the skills grow, the future apps produced will diverge into a myriad of different looks and feels, but with the same underlying foundation.

So what is creativity? Is it the entire thing, or is it just the interpretation? If I took someone else's work and felt I improved on it, should not the improvement be considered the creative part, with the foundation simply being the ladder upon which I climbed to a greater height? Certainly musicians who cover the songs of others, and make a new but similar song with their own interpretation could be considered to have plagiarised the original artists work, but to those of us who enjoy the new interpretation, do we really care? Lol.

Imagine a person who entered a poem into a competition, but it lacked something, so it didn't win, but later someone found where it lacked and improved on it, and it won. Was the first person creative for putting together something that didn't work, or was the second person creative for watering it and allowing it to grow into something beautiful? Perhaps it's all in the interpretation. ;)

@divergent

Computing especially at uni very tempting for students to copy work, especially with time constraints. I always approached what is the assignment trying to teach you. So I tended to go overboard. That's putting it lightly. Recall a COBOL assignment over 250 pages after documentation. 4000 lines of code v about 400 lines for most students. That was with extensive code reuse, data driven etc.

Never really thought about creativity in programming. Unless the count the process of breaking down problems into smaller ones, ultimately into functions that do only one thing, Also how you anticipate the unexpected.

The way you break down the problem, techniques used eg the sorting method chosen, the design of interface being intuitive etc etc, guess can be described as a creative process. Can go on and on how about code reuse, data driven etc to make your program flexible.

Overall you can tell if someone just plagiarized a program. In the end you just cheat yourself from the purpose of being there. To learn, verses getting that piece of paper.

Yeh it is an very interesting site on what creativity is. New to creative WOL so finding them fun.

For the poem I guess depends on what was changed does it transform it in some way. Like just changing the subject matter say from dog to cat and keeping the rest bit like the Optus WOL competition. Thou I'm still undecided if this would be called plagiarized. Thou I know where they got the idea, and and see they put virtually no effect in. Thou ideas/creativity can come in a flash. I struggle to see what creative input they had. But does that make it plagiarized?

@divergent In summary as each student is at different stages in learning, and experience, this will determine their own combinatorial creative works.

@divergent Agree about the hello world app initially they may look all the same due to the level of knowledge. There may be subtle differences like hard coding the string, or using a constant, using a function and passing in the value to say allow formatting e.g. centered, or which language to display etc, to be data driven/ code reuse. Also maybe use of design techniques like Object Oriented verses Procedural. "Simple" design decisions taken initially may limit the flexibility or ease of maintenance of the application later on.