Creativity and Engineering Education: Assessing the Impact of a Multidisciplinary Project Course on Engineering Students’ Creativity

Abstract

Creativity is the essential driving force, and creative engineers are the drivers entrusted to propel the technology-driven industry to the pinnacle of innovations in all engineering sectors. Accordingly, creativity is being integrated into engineering education in different ways, from a single lecture to more extensive curriculum level approaches. In this paper, we measured the effect of a multidisciplinary project course, a joint effort between the School of Arts, Design and Architecture, and the School of Engineering, on students’ creativity. In particular, we assessed the Originality, Novelty, and Quantity of solutions produced by participants in two tasks, an Alternate uses test and the ShapeStorm exercise. An alternate uses test assessed the written form of divergent thinking, and the ShapeStorm exercise assessed the visual form of divergent thinking. Statistical analysis of the data indicated that solutions for the written divergent thinking task produced by students post-course were more novel than pre-course. We did not find a statistically significant improvement in the Quantity. Similarly, for the visual divergent thinking task, we see no statistically significant increase.

Horizontal and Vertical Knowledge Management in Multidisciplinary Research and Design-Build Teaching: A Timber-Only Trail

“…In earlier courses with up to 290 students we perused similar vertical studio and multidisciplinary approaches. Although we could prove a significantly positive effect on students' creativity through creativity tests, such as Alternate Uses Tests (AUT) and ShapeStorm (SS) Exercises [30,31] but together with challenging pedagogical and logistic tasks a relatively high number of students complained about lack of clarity and meaningfulness. However, any system that allows free choice does so at the expense of rigorous control.…”

Master Builders revisited

“…However, as mentioned above, and based on the readiness of mindsets, it provides a common ground for different disciplines, which integrates the lessons learnt into a continuous process. It is meanwhile well known that design thinking and creative design practice, in short, investing in early design phases, are not only beneficial for the final object, product, or consumer experience, but also transcended into a comprehensive innovation management approach, facilitating entrepreneurship and innovation (Rittel 2013;Deo et al 2020;Auernhammer & Roth 2021) Apart from the immediate and direct benefits from the lessons learnt, it also contributes in our particular case to the further development of the project using salvaged timber and wooden nails as an exemplary case of merging architectural and structural design.…”

From crossing chromosomes to crossing curricula – a biomimetic analogy for cross-disciplinary engineering curriculum planning

“…Miller and Olds (1994) describe a multidisciplinary capstone already in the 1990s. Some examples of interdisciplinary programs or courses include service-learning projects (Davis et al 2014;White and Nitkin 2014), a common studio (Cotantino et al 2010), or a course (Deo, Hölttä-Otto, and Filz 2020;Keenahan and McCrum 2020;Li et al 2015) between architects and engineers; and mechatronics courses offered for both mechanical and electrical engineering students (Arkin et al 1997;Shooter and McNeill 2002). Spitzer (2013) discusses two case studies of integrating interdisciplinary teaching into the curriculum in Turkey and Germany.…”

“…Hotaling et al (2012) show students from multidisciplinary projects outperformed their monodisciplinary counterparts in project performance and employability. Some interdisciplinary courses and programs are designed to increase specific skills such as creativity (Cotantino et al 2010;Deo, Hölttä-Otto, and Filz 2020), broader work life skills (Costa et al 2019;McKay, De Pennington, and Giard 2013;Steiner 2004;Tranquillo 2017), or specific multidisciplinary skills such as ability to 'synthesize both concepts and approaches from multiple domains to develop an integrated solution to a given interdisciplinary challenge' (Lattuca et al 2017;Richter and Paretti 2009). On the other hand, programs that merge (usually) two disciplines often aim in equipping students with skills from more than one disciplines thus producing 'bilingual' students (Bierema 2019;Klaassen 2018).…”