Vol. VIII (LXX) No. 2/2018 80 - 87 The analysis of the creativity styles used by a group of Computer Science students Beatrice Adriana Balgiu * University Politehnica of Bucharest, Bucharest, România, Abstract The study investigates the creativity styles used by a group of Computer Science students (N = 158; Mage = 20,99; 51 females) and examines the existence of a pattern of relations between creativity styles and self-evaluated creativity. The scale for Self-Perceived Creative Capacity (SPCC), the Creativity Styles Questionnaire (CSQ) for creation methods and a creative thinking test (UNU) have been used. The results show the students who consider themselves more creative report a certain creativity style such as (a) the use of techniques, (b) the use of unconscious processes, (c) the control of the environment and (d) the use of senses. The reliability values of the SPCC and the Creativity Styes Questionnaire subscales were similar to the reported in previous studies. Keywords: creativity styles; students; Computer Science 1. Introduction The problem of the modalities of innovation of the individuals who work in the Computer Science (system analysts, software designers, software programmers, software testers etc) is of particular interest both to the working team climate (Fagan, 2004; Ahmed, Campbell, Beg et al, 2011) and to the harmonization of working styles with the stages in work, such as problem representation, program design, coding, and debugging (Bishop-Clark, 1999; Ahmed, Capretz, Bouktif et al, 2013). The results of the Computer Science (CS) sphere analysis show the difficulty of cataloging individual differences in the realization of tasks (Teague, 1998). The variables investigated as factors that can help explain this variability were, in particular, creativity styles and personality traits (Bishop-Clark, 1999), both of which being predictors of performance (Barrick, Mount & Judge, 2001; Rui, Wei, Li et al, 2011; Cegielski & Hall 2006 apud Kanij, Merkel & Grundy, 2013; Ahmed, Capretz, Bouktif et al, 2013). In general, the analysis of innovation modalities was based both on the declarations of some famous creators regarding their own creative mechanisms (McAvinue & Robertson, 2007), and on the study of common individuals (active in organized heuristic methods or even not involved in the latter). Thus, pieces of information which led to the concretization of certain creative ways were gathered. Without aiming at enumerating all of them, we will list here those which have been studied more frequently. Thus, for example, certain authors show that creative ideas appear after relaxation, trance states or even that they come from somewhere from above. We remind about an extreme of these statements, namely Tesla’s who used to claim that he was only a receiver of the knowledge of the Universe (Ferris, 2016). In this regard, we can mention both scientists and artists who claimed they used visual mental imagery in creativity such as Bohr, Maxwell, Poincaré, Leibniz, Kant, as well as Breton and Kandinsky (Le Boutiller & Marks, 2003; Palmiero, Cardi & Olivetti Belardinelli, 2011). * Corresponding author. E-mail address: beatrice.balgiu@upb.ro