AC 2011-1315: FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE THE CREATIVITY OF ENGINEERING STUDENTS

Many engineering curricula focus on educating engineers who are not only technically competent but also capable of designing innovative engineering solutions. In many of those curricula, creativity is fostered with instruction in design methodology, including ideation techniques such as brainstorming and TIPS/TRIZ. In this paper, factors that influence the creativity of freshman and senior level engineering students are investigated. The results support the hypothesis that freshman engineering students are more creative than senior engineering students and that the introduction of creativity enhancement techniques does not affect this result. The level of enjoyment experienced by the students did not affect the results significantly. Introduction and Background Innovation is said to be the key to keeping the U.S. competitive. This emphasis has led to a need to teach innovation and creativity as part of standard engineering curricula. In most American universities, creativity is currently taught as a set of methods such as brainstorming, TRIZ, or Design by Analogy. These ideation techniques have been found to be effective when compared to unguided concept generation. While creativity methods can be effective, other factors may be even more important in increasing the innovation potential of engineering students. Particularly relevant research indicates that freshman students entering the engineering program are capable of generating more creative designs than senior students. This finding is in line with the research in cognitive psychology, which indicates that skill acquisition can decrease a person’s ability to solve ill defined problems that require creative thinking. In similar research, Guilford found that people at lower levels of intelligence do not possess enough domain knowledge and are thus unlikely to be creative. However, people at higher levels of intelligence are not always creative either. While they possess the knowledge, their level of creativity can vary from very low to high. Similar results have been found when investigating experts in the areas of baseball and chess. It has been suggested that highly skilled individuals may have trouble adapting their thinking in order to produce creative outcomes. Even teachers of engineering design are sometimes unaware of their own blocks to creativity. On the other hand, Ericsson has proposed that the development of skill can facilitate creative thinking because a highly skilled person is better able to develop new techniques and skills. Highly skilled individuals are better able to adjust their behavior to demands that arise, suggesting that skill is an important determinant of the capacity to restructure. In engineering, this trend could be exemplified by senior engineers approaching a problem breadth first, looking at many design solutions before narrowing on one, as opposed to junior engineers’ less creative depth first strategy. In this paper, we focus on investigating the differences in creativity between freshman and senior mechanical engineering students. It is assumed that the differences between these two groups are primarily due to their skill acquisition as they proceed through the engineering curriculum. Assuming the engineering students follow skill acquisition models proposed in the literature, the freshman students enter the college as novices. They then start acquiring skill and reach the first stage of skill acquisition, the cognitive stage. This stage involves encoding a skill or learning a set of facts relevant to the skill. In engineering, this stage includes acquiring basic engineering skills such as calculus or graphical representation. These skills are then used repeatedly in the different engineering classes to solve engineering problems. Eventually the students reach the next stage: the associative stage. This stage involves a transformation from fact-based knowledge to procedural knowledge. This stage is characterized by a significant reduction in design errors as students gain practice in solving open-ended design problems. For example, students may become more familiar with appropriate design choices such as typical areas of maximum stress and how to avoid them. Most graduating engineering students are at this level. The final stage would be the autonomous stage, which involves the transformation of procedures from controlled to automatic processes. This stage can only be reached after multiple years of practice. Expert engineers are generally performing at this autonomous level. Prior work with 40 senior and 28 freshman students provided evidence that freshman were more creative than senior mechanical engineering students. For this paper, we expanded the previous study and experimented with 20 additional students to further validate the previous finding. We also exposed both freshmen and seniors to the same creativity method and explored what effect the method had on the students. During the experiment we noticed uneven levels of excitement about the task. While some students dove into the problem at hand and really seemed to enjoy the experiment, others looked more forced to do it. Thus, another potential factor affecting creativity, could be the level of enjoyment associated with the creative task. Previous research has linked enjoyment and motivation together, and enjoyment has also been found to boost student motivation in engineering. For example, improvisation comedy has been suggested as an addition to the other common creativity methods. In this work, we recorded the observable level of each group's enjoyment of their task and investigated whether it had any effect on the creative output. To summarize, this paper focuses on looking at the effect of skill and level of enjoyment on student creativity by investigating the following hypotheses: Hypothesis 1a) Freshman students produce more creative outputs than their senior counterparts without any creativity method. Hypothesis 1b) Freshman students produce more creative outputs than their senior counterparts when using a creativity method. Hypothesis 1c) Freshman and senior students produce concepts that are of equal technical feasibility. Hypothesis 2) If the students enjoy the exercise, they create more innovative concepts.