2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Introduction to Intentional Ideation Methodology for Engineering Students – Initial Perceptions
Presented at Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) Technical Session 7: Navigating Failure, Bias, and New Ideas
Ideation is the process of generating ideas. Engineering relies on generating ideas and transforming them into products, processes, and systems; hence, ideation is a critical skill for future engineering practitioners, innovators, and researchers. To help students learn and develop ideation skills, two intentional ideation approaches were incorporated into a multidisciplinary project course in the college of engineering in a large state university. The students were introduced to the concept of intentional ideation in a workshop setting. The two intentional idea generation techniques of Brain Writing and Semantic Intuition were introduced. For both exercises, students were asked to sit together and work in their project groups. After the workshop, an anonymous survey was distributed that invited students to respond to a set of reflection prompts to describe their experience and share their opinions about these two ideation processes. Data was collected in the Fall 2025 semester when 151 students were enrolled in the course; 150 students consented to participate in the study and their responses were collected. The students’ responses to the reflection prompts in the post-workshop survey and workshop output were entered as data for the study. The student responses to the reflection prompts on Brain Writing and Semantic Intuition were qualitatively analyzed, using both closed and open coding, to investigate whether these activities served as useful aids to learn and practice intentional ideation. Closed coding results indicate that 82.67% of participants reported Brain Walking to be positive for their concept generation, 4% did not see it as positive, and 13.33% were neutral. Similarly, 52.67% of participants reported Semantic Intuition to be positive for their concept generation, 29.33% did not see it as positive, and 18% were neutral. Furthermore, open coding results indicated that students observed various types of beneficial gains for themselves (i.e., individual), their team (i.e., group), and their team’s concept generation (i.e., task). While benefits for the individual included perspective shifts, self-understanding as well as having a structured method to use, benefits for the group were described as collaboration, overcoming group challenges along with cohesion. Finally, benefits for the task included quantity, quality, diversity, and iterative refinement of ideas. While Brain Walking benefits were distributed relatively evenly across individual, group, and task domains, Semantic Intuition benefits were primarily for the individual, with less impact on the group or the task. A demonstrative example of how students made use of these processes as they collectively thought about a given problem definition is also provided.
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Ms. McKenzie Landrum University of Florida [biography]
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Yasemin Kocyigit University of Florida [biography]
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Sabrina Claire Rule University of Florida [biography]
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David A. Schnoor University of Florida [biography]
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Prof. Elif Akçalı University of Florida [biography]
The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026