Investigating the effect of using specialized software on promotion of modeling skills and creativity of students in the course of preliminary architectural design (3)

Creativity is one of the most influential factors in architectural education and is the most important tool in increasing the designer's power in the architectural design process. The purpose was to examine the effect of employing computer software on improving students' modeling skills and creativity. This research is an applied study that employs a descriptive-analytical design and causal-comparative methodology. The students were assigned to two separate classrooms of 30 students from which were taught architecture design using computer software, and the students from which practiced only modeling and hand drawings. Two-sample t-test for independent groups employed for data analysis in this research. The P_value for creativity has been calculated as 0.001 and for modeling equal to 0.000, which can be concluded that at the level of 5% error, the averages of the two software methods and free hand have a significant difference. Also, the correlation value between creativity and modeling in software-oriented and freehand-oriented methods is significant, and the positiveness of the coefficients indicates the existence of a direct relationship between the two variables. The results indicated that the use of architectural software applications were shown improve the modeling skills and creativity of students owing to their perceived higher accuracy of drawing and the capacity to edit and apply changes on the design.