A measured educational experience developing creativity with graduate and undergraduate engineering students

Creative and innovative people are recognized for their contribution to society’s wellbeing. Engineers are often called upon to produce innovative ideas and thus participate in the improvement of their organization’s products, services, and processes. Not aiming at educating specialists with a degree in creativity, we nonetheless believe future engineers could benefit from a deliberate development of their creative abilities. However, building an effective and valid course to develop participants’ creativity is not without challenges.This paper describes an innovative cognitive approach to enhance creativity as well as the pedagogical strategies underlining a creativity course for engineering students. It also presents the pre-post results measured with a revised version of the CEDA (Creative Engineering Design Assessment). We evaluated the creative performance of 59 students before and after a 45-hour creativity course. Quantitative data shows statistically higher numbers after the course than before. Qualitative data provides further evidence of the course’s relevance and effectiveness.We conclude that students’ creativity can be increase and that the course enables a better understanding of creativity and how to foster it.