2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Undergraduate engineering curricula are often structured around producing correct technical answers to well-defined problems, justifying the belief that engineering practice is focused on objective precision instead of open-ended inquiry (Daly, Mosyjowski & Seifert, 2014). In practice, however, engineers frequently engage in divergent thinking—the process of generating multiple novel ideas in response to a problem or prompt (Murphy et al., 2025). This paper reports on the experiences of students engaging in divergent thinking during a design incubator at the Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) makerspace. The incubator was divided into two parts: during the first, students completed a series of spring ideation workshops focused on problem identification. During workshops, students learned structured techniques for ideation, developed and refined a problem statement, and conducted interviews with stakeholder who experience that problem. Students then returned for a summer design residency, using the tools available in the makerspace to ideate and prototype their solution and develop a formal product pitch.

After completing the program, investigators conducted 2 focus groups and 9 semi-structured interviews using Clancy et al.’s (2022) protocol for eliciting narratives of divergent thinking. These data are analyzed to investigate a) what divergent thinking strategies students deployed during both elements of the program; and b) how students made design decisions when faced with multiple competing ideas or prospective solutions. Results suggest that the incubator’s program design was successful in enabling students to ideate multiple competing ideas. During the design process, student teams deployed 3 primary strategies for discriminating between ideas: prioritizing team consensus, validating ideas through external feedback, and relying on a core design principle. The implications of these results for enabling and practicing student divergent thinking among first-time and beginner designers are discussed.