The development of creativity in engineering students

Engineering teaching practices typically tends to be dominated by the application of scientific principles. This often encourages standard measures and procedures for engineering activities. This can inadvertently reduce engineering students' creative capabilities, which are particularly critical in their transitions to their early professional careers. The purpose of this paper is to highlight challenges faced by engineering students when developing their practical creative capabilities. From this a better understanding of the type of formal teaching required can be had. Engineering students in two different subjects, machine design and engineering management, were given large projects that required a report to be produced. In the report the students were to document a creativity tool that they found and then used to solve an identified problem that needed creativity. While students were given a list of tools to help their searching, that is all that they were given. After assessment a focus group about the experience and challenges faced by the students while taking on these challenges was held for each group. Preliminary results indicate that students enjoy taking on challenges that require creativity. However, for the development of creativity, students' background and understanding of creativity within engineering, as along with the context required to support creativity, should be addressed. This is particularly the case when students seem to be struggling to recognise the situations that require creativity. Engineering students need to be taught more than creativity. They need to be taught how to combine this with their knowledge of engineering theory to develop ingenious solution, which is the work of the engineer.