Development of creativity of engineering students: A cause for concern?

Abstract

This research paper describes the study of how instruction in the use of an idea generation heuristic may differently influence the creativity performance of first year, third year, and postgraduate students from the same institution. Innovation and creativity are increasingly becoming important skills for engineers, but some students suffer design fixation and are unable to effectively produce solution ideas. An experiment was devised whereby students received instruction in use of an idea generation heuristic, and then spent time generating ideas to a real-world engineering-related problem. Results showed that first year students performed better than third year students, who in turn perfo..