Teaching Creative Problem Solving in Engineering Education

Introduction

In recent years, creativity has been widely recognized as vital to success in the emerging global economy. An issue of PeerReview (Wince-Smith D. L., 2006), a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, is entitled The Creativity Imperative and offers a collection of papers acknowledging the importance of creativity in building a competitive workforce and calling for education institutions to play a more active role in teaching creativity to students. In the last decades, many industrialised countries are shifting from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy, an economy based on the production and distribution of knowledge and information, rather than production and distribution of goods. In these economies, knowledge workers are “symbolic analysts” who manipulate symbols rather than machines, and who create conceptual artefacts rather than physical objects. Then the importance of creativity, innovation, and ingenuity is central to the knowledge economy. If the core of the knowledge society is creativity, then the key task for educators is to prepare learners to be capable of participating creatively in an innovation economy (OECD, 2015).

Individual creativity is ubiquitous. New technologies both enable and urge fresh approaches to creativity in the context of education. University-level education offers a natural place to adjust pedagogical structures in favor of an approach to learning that organizes the intellectual community into new patterns of interaction and time allocation. This direction is made possible by the vast improvements in access to information, data, knowledge, and opinion. University students live in this world of access, in an ever-expanding sea of material. Networking second-by-second is central to their zeitgeist. The result is far more than social. Interaction and collaboration are now important in most workplaces, and are expected to be even more important in the future. Higher education needs to use its natural resources in the ways that develop content knowledge and skills in a culture infused at new levels by investigation, cooperation, connection, integration, and synthesis. Creativity is necessary to accomplish this goal. When central and culturally pervasive, creativity becomes exemplified and enhanced for every student. As a technique that can be advanced through practice, problem solving becomes a driving pedagogy in developing creativity in higher education (Vidal, 2009). Universities must meet the challenge of reapportioning time if suggested changes are to occur. The format of classroom lecture is by nature, not a natural laboratory for interaction and collaboration. Making the curriculum about interpersonal exchange opens the experience for every student to express, share, and test his or her creative instincts. Exchange turns the historical paradigm around and makes the presence of other students and faculty the core attribute of the curriculum and the scheduled classes value added.

The seminal book, A Whole New Mind (Pink, 2005), the author makes the point that in the twenty-first-century workplace, collaborative thinking and interacting will be increasingly core. Although jobs will change, diverge, and morph, employers are more and more going to seek workers who are adept at teamwork and capable of contributing original thoughts to group assignments and tasks. As the university’s purpose lies beyond mere career preparation, it is also incumbent on the academy to validate the college diploma as relevant to the future of its graduates. Therefore, the curricula must be intentionally formed around courses, projects, and seminars in which both collaboration and creativity work in consort.