2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineers use both critical and creative thinking skills to apply their technical knowledge and develop solutions to both large- and small-scale problems. Many of these problems and their associated contexts necessitate innovative, novel ideas in order to make a meaningful and lasting impact. Because of this, creativity is an essential skill for engineering students to enhance through understanding theoretical underpinnings and developing skills and experience through deliberate practice. The creative process begins with the cultivation of curiosity and includes problem and opportunity identification, ideation, taking initiative to build and test an idea, and implementation, and there are a multitude of specific techniques that can be utilized in each of these phases. Existing creativity techniques and tools assist individuals, groups, and teams in enhancing their project efficiency and increasing the novelty and effectiveness of their ideas and implementation strategies. With the increasing prevalence and accessibility of generative AI, it is worth exploring how these applications might be utilized for idea generation and in the creative process.
This work describes a deliverable that includes the utilization of generative AI assigned to students within a graduate-level engineering course in creativity at a large university. Similar to the journals and sketches of famous creative individuals throughout history, the Creativity Portfolio is an individual assignment designed to facilitate students’ documentation of their discoveries, insights, inspirations, identified problems and opportunities for improvement, ideas, design details, and implementation strategies gained and developed throughout the semester. In a pilot modification to this assignment, students were asked to develop two distinct parts in their Portfolio: one part encouraged students to use a physical notebook and develop content without the use of digital references and tools while the other part necessitated the use of generative AI and inventive prompt creation to identify specific and unique problem statements and ideas. This work highlights the details of this assignment including the formal learning objectives, the purpose and justification for these changes, and initial lessons learned. By incorporating generative AI—a cutting-edge technology that is currently widely accessible to students—into an academic assignment focused on creative thinking, students can gain formal, facilitated experience in seeing both the opportunities and limitations of such tools.