Creativity in Engineering Education.

Abstract

There has been much discussion in recent years on the need for creative engineers in American industry and the associated need for engineering schools to foster creative thinking ability in their students. The first problem one encounters when thinking about how these needs might be addressed is that while creativity has been exhaustively studied, it has never been satisfactorily defined. There is general agreement, however, that creativity (whatever it is) involves the ability to put things (words, concepts, methods, devices) together in novel ways. Moreover, at least some types of creative ability are thought to involve skill at divergent production—generation of many possible solutions to a given problem—as opposed to convergent production, or generation of “the right answer.”