2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Tomorrow’s engineers need to be innovative problem solvers able to approach multidisciplinary engineering challenges creatively yet methodically. Across the United States and the world, stakeholders, including NAE, NSPE, and ASEE, increasingly acknowledge the importance of creativity in engineering design. High school curricula are starting to introduce engineering concepts, including robotics, 3D printing, and the engineering design process. Traditionally, these technical concepts have been separated from opportunities to practice creativity and innovation. In this setting, students are led to think that creativity and innovation are not compatible with engineering design.
The following paper evaluates the effectiveness of strategies geared toward encouraging creativity and innovation in conjunction with the engineering design process to foster new, unique, or atypical approaches to engineering problems. In a one-week civil engineering summer course, high school students were challenged to approach engineering problems with this integrated mindset. The authors introduced the students to an eight-phase engineering design process on the first day of class. This framework was developed in [1] based on realistic scenarios used in engineering and was proven effective in the literature for novice audiences in engineering. In class, students interacted with real-world problems and brainstormed creative and innovative solutions each day, either working toward the final project or with in-class activities. Using this framework, students were encouraged to identify and/or create new, unique, or atypical solutions while accommodating real-life constraints such as budget, location, and affected communities. Throughout the week, students were given various opportunities to practice brainstorming creative solutions in the context of the engineering design process from the point of view of different engineering disciplines.
The effectiveness of the curriculum and the teaching approach is evaluated based on student evaluations, pre- and post-class surveys, student artifacts throughout the week, and a final multidisciplinary poster presentation. As part of this evaluation, a rubric based on the work by [2] was adapted to assess creativity and application of the engineering design phases in the final project. In general, students showed increased knowledge and application of the engineering design process over the course. This assessment suggests that creativity can be fostered through well-designed course materials. From the authors’ perspective, the developed curriculum was effective since it included diverse course activities championed in the literature, including problem-based learning, interaction with physical models, multidisciplinary case studies, site visits, new and modern technology, and a real-world, problem-based, summative assessment. Furthermore, the solutions presented in the poster show the use of problem-solving skills and the integration of multiple engineering disciplines. Finally, the paper shares detailed techniques and curricula that can be implemented in engineering courses to foster creativity and innovation while developing a better understanding of the engineering design process.