See Part I where I wrote about the Creativity Crisis in Engineering.
What are methods for teaching creativity?
Creativity can be taught. Promote creativity in the classroom by:
Explicitly championing creativity
Rewarding creativity
Being positive & non-judgmental to student ideas
Developing assignments that stimulate creativity
For example, simply telling students to be creative can make them more creative. Being positive and non-judgmental about student ideas, encouraging them to develop many possible solutions, and rewarding creativity will also encourage creativity (Kazerounian & Foley, 2007; Wankat & Oreovicz, 2015).
Small ways to stimulate creativity in lectures and homework assignments
RIGHT Improving divergent thinking
Grading
Students can be rewarded points for creativity in developing a solution
Have students develop new homework or test questions and reward them for more novel question development
Brainstorming
For a brainstorming exercise, the instructor presents a problem, and the students develop many ideas, build on them, and then evaluate them. The most promising ideas are further developed.
It is important for the instructor to make no criticism of ideas and allow the students to develop the ideas on their own (Atwood & Pretz, 2016; Charyton et al., 2011; Conwell, James C., George D. Catalano, Beard, 1993; Millan, 1996; Wankat & Oreovicz, 2015).
Activities include freewriting, journaling, drawing ideas
Lateral Thinking
Lateral thinking involves restructuring patterns, changing viewpoints, jumping around, changing the problem statement, and avoiding logical (vertical thinking) analysis (Wankat & Oreovicz, 2015). The ideas are then evaluated using logical analysis.
Activities include creative games, questions, and exercises. For example, the instructor could ask the students “What is an economical use of snow?” (Wankat & Oreovicz, 2015). Since many engineers are left-brained (verbal analytical thinking), instructors can give them exercises that use the right-brain (visual, perceptive thinking). Examples of “right-brain” exercises include perceptual illusion drawings.
Engineering Education
More engineering Writing, Ethics, & Design Classes
Additionally, entire engineering classes can be devoted to teaching creativity. Design courses are an obvious way for a student to brainstorm a solution to a problem, design, and test it (Conwell, James C., George D. Catalano, Beard, 1993). Engineering technical writing courses can also devote extended time to promoting creativity (Moore, 2017). For example, a class can be devoted to writing about an ethical problem. These courses can provide safe, low-stake environments in which students can develop and revise multiple drafts of their work (Moore, 2017). Overall, for creativity to be incorporated into the classroom effectively, it is important that students are willing to participate and that there is an enthusiastic instructor who is non-judgmental, rewards students for creative solutions, and practices and builds on these methods in class.
Integrating Art & Humanities
Illumination and calligraphy by Sangorski & Sutcliffe in The Raven: Manuscript
My favorite moment in object-orientated coding class was when the professor put up a poem of “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe on the screen and pointed out how the stanzas and repetition were reminiscent of computer coding principles.
I am a huge proponent of integrating science and humanities. For example, I helped in a “haiku” writing session for 4H students coming to visit our microbiology lab when I was in grad school. In undergrad microbiology, we came up with a “microbe song” at the end of the year to perform. The most interesting was “Microbe Like You” paired with Adele’s “Someone Like You”.
Drexel University’s Freshman Design Project focused on providing, re-enforcing, and exploring creativity by using a joint poetry and engineering assignment to deconstruct the assumption that engineers are not interested in writing and to increase creativity (Millan, 1996). For the assignment, students chose a technological object (i.e., printer), researched it, and wrote a poem about it.
Students took a Humanities class called “How a Poem Works” in which they were taught about reading and writing poetry. Students then participated in non-judgmental brainstorming sessions. However, students were encouraged to use technical and scientific words in their poems, but were discouraged from using rhyming patterns. In their engineering class, they read their poem aloud in a “poetry workshop” attended by both their engineering and humanities professors. In the workshop, students also critiqued other poems and then revised their work based on their comments. Poems were not assigned a letter grade.
The instructors noted high attendance and participation in the poetry workshop. The instructors received 500 original poems and noted that each had a unique voice. They stated that this exercise helped to break stereotypes that engineers are not interested in poetry. For example, they noted that some students had written many poems before and were relieved that engineering is not incompatible with poetry. The instructors argued that engineers have many skills which are related to the writing process, including knowledge of their physical world, problem solving, technical and scientific vocabulary, visual orientation, and the ability to work with symbols. However, they noted that half of the poems had clumsy rhyming schemes and few poems used a narrative scheme, which demonstrates that the students still had rigid ideas about poetry.
Engineering Capstone Projects
Capstone projects are a staple of undergraduate engineering programs, typically completed in the senior year over one or more semesters. Conducted in teams, these projects aim to design a novel product. In fact, our team’s capstone project won 2nd place in a state competition. Later, as a graduate student, I often served as a judge at seniors’ end-of-year showcase, where some projects were impressively innovative. Capstone projects offer students a valuable opportunity to engage deeply with an engineering topic, though developing a strong initial idea is often the greatest challenge.
Another study by Conwell et al. (1993) examined a two-semester senior design course at Louisiana State University to design, build, and test an experience. The study emphasized both divergent and convergent thinking. Groups of students worked on designing a wheelchair which would allow an individual to retrieve objects on a high shelf as well as on the floor. The groups went through a series of role-playing exercises to determine the main barrier of the design (vertical hand reaching). Then, the groups were encouraged to brainstorm solutions to this vertical reach issue
Students were taught the concepts of “leap-frogging” (using other ideas) and “piggybacking” (modifying previous ideas). The groups then had to do multiple rounds of evaluation on their ideas, examining their design’s feasibility, manufacturability, safety, reliability, economics, appearance, and operation. The best design of all the groups was chosen. The class then built the chair and conducted further testing with the chair including battery life, comfort, and system response. In the end, a novel, adjustable height seat was developed and successfully field tested.
…But not AI chatbots
At my university, there are currently a lot of teaching grants available to those professors who can integrate AI into their lectures and assignments. Many believe that AI chatbots can create a more personalized learning environment for students. While I do believe AI is a powerful tool in scientific research especially for sifting through large datasets, using AI to stimulate student creativity is dubious.
Early research suggests that AI chatbots are not effective tools to enhance student creativity. In a study of 51 Industrial Design and Product Development undergraduates at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), students generated eight ideas per task within 30 minutes, either with or without ChatGPT. Results showed no significant difference in idea quality or quantity between groups, though students expressed willingness and interest for using ChatGPT for idea generation. Afterwards, however, they pointed out that responses were disappointingly homogenous.
Baltà‐Salvador et al. 2024. Left: Creativity outcomes across several metrics, with ideas generated without ChatGPT (grey) scoring slightly higher than those with ChatGPT (black). Right: Student-identified advantages and risks of using chatbots in their studies
More disturbingly, there is weird emphasis on “prompt engineering” for AI chatbots which Google runs classes on. They even have a section on how to use AI be a ‘creative partner’ through developing certain things as “prompt-chaining”—asking about the previous response and adding another question based on the last response. Like, okay? And??
Conclusion
Overall, encouraging creativity in engineering will promote the production of novel designs and products. Currently, most engineering curriculums do not emphasize or value creativity. Several methods can be incorporated into courses to teach creativity. Instructors are encouraged to be non-judgmental, encouraging, and positive when teaching creativity. Additionally, there is evidence that engineering design creativity differs from general creativity since creative design requires both convergent and divergent thinking. Creativity is especially beneficial for the design stage of a problem. Additionally, creative solutions must be followed by logical evaluation of the design’s feasibility.
References
Engineering, N. A. of. (2004). Chapter 4: Attributes of Engineers 2020. In The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century (pp. 53–57). https://doi.org/10.17226/10999
Moore, K. C. (2017). Ethical Dilemmas in the Engineering Writing Classroom. In Creative Ways of Knowing in Engineering (pp. 197–218).
Wankat, P. C., & Oreovicz, F. S. (2015). Teaching Engineering (2nd ed.). West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.
I really love this topic, there's so much talk about innovation and disruption and not enough problem-based creativity and ingenuity. We could have much more sustainable technologies if this were taught more consistently.