Lighting the fuse for creative problem solving

Abstract

Engineering programs have the unfortunate reputation of stifling the creativity of their students. While the validity of this belief certainly varies greatly depending on many factors, the reality is that the engineering education community can do better. The rigor and pace of the traditional curriculum, the myriad of extra and co-curricular activities associated with campus life, and the pursuit of the all-powerful "A", while important, fight against the joy of deep learning and the space for creative thought and exploration. It is vital to equip and permit students to cultivate their creative problem solving abilities; and let's face it, the world needs better creative problem solvers with a technical education. Unfortunately, engineering faculty face similar struggles when it comes to space and intentionality for creativity. Moreover, engineering educators as a whole are even less skilled at teaching creativity; some might even say that creativity simply can't be taught. But still, the world needs better creative problem solvers with a technical education. This paper details a series of creative problem solving interventions at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (RHIT) implementing a creative problem solving tool with documented industry success. By having participants make individual connections with social, cultural, market, and technological trends, the tool, IdeaKeg™, has the primary goal of getting participants to simply ask better questions. It naturally follows that better solutions to a given problem can be found if starting from better questions. The IdeaKeg tool was implemented for both teams of faculty and teams of students in several different applications including faculty course development, department retreats, senior design projects, student composition projects, and more. This paper summarizes the IdeaKeg process, the different implementations of IdeaKeg at RHIT, feedback from both faculty and student participants, and reflections from IdeaKeg facilitators. Additionally, this paper provides the results of a study in which two separate groups of similar demographics were tasked with developing creative solutions to two posed problems. For one problem, the group utilized the IdeaKeg tool, for the other problem they worked using a traditional brainstorming process.