2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Integration of assignments into engineering education curricula to provide opportunities for engineering students to practice their creative thinking skills encounters several obstacles. To provide students with the opportunity to think creatively around technical concepts, mathematical models, and solution algorithms, students in an upper-level industrial and systems engineering course focusing on the design and operation of inventory and supply chain systems were asked to work on poem-writing assignments. Specifically, students were required to create two poems that focused on deterministic inventory modeling and stochastic inventory modeling, respectively. After each poem-writing assignment, students were also required to respond to several open-ended questions asking them to (i) describe how and why they picked a particular topic for their poems; (ii) list which course materials and other resources they used to create their poems; (iii) provide an estimate of the amount of time they spent to complete their poems from conception to submission.

Data were collected during the Fall 2022 semester. Among the 26 students enrolled, 21 consented to participate in the study at the end of the semester. The poems written by these students and their responses to reflection prompts were entered as data for the study.  The participant responses to reflection prompts were analyzed qualitatively in two steps: First, the students’ descriptions of their (i) motivations for choosing a particular topic (i.e., why) and (ii) their individual approaches to complete the poem on the chosen topic (i.e., how) were identified utilizing qualitative content analysis. Next, students’ stated “why” and/or “how” rationales were coded using Self-Determination Theory (SDT) to examine four levels of motivational regulation (external, introjected, identified, and intrinsic) across seven primary motivational rationales (ease of completion, personal interest, creative compatibility, important topic, prior knowledge, future assessment, and enhance understanding) that engineering students experienced during poem- writing assignments.  Finally, code patterns as well as data on time on task and resource use across two assignments were quantitatively analyzed. The results indicate that across all primary motivational rationales, Creative Compatibility was the only rationale that spanned the full SDT regulatory spectrum in our data. Overall, student-stated motivations were dominated by more autonomous motivation (intrinsic motivation and identified regulation) than controlled motivation (external and introjected regulation) for these poem-writing assignments. Reports of amotivation and integrated regulation were not observed.