Are Creative Capstone Design Projects Successful? Relating Project Creativity to Course Outcomes

Abstract

In the past ten years, numerous papers have presented techniques for fostering creativity in design courses and in individual engineering students. Creativity is desirable because the ability to combine and synthesize ideas, take risks, and innovate is necessary to address open-ended problems with novel and innovative solutions. However, capstone design students typically earn grades by developing complete, justified solutions, communicating their design process clearly, and satisfying the needs of sponsors and external or internal evaluators. Because of this, creativity is often not explicitly measured in capstone design courses and is only indirectly part of the final measured course outcomes. This study examines the relationship between measures of creativity and course outcomes for a mechanical engineering capstone design course. This work focused on projects that were intended as or could be potentially developed as commercial products. Multiple reviewers using the validated VALUE rubric for creative thinking evaluated eighteen projects. The VALUE rubric assesses works on acquiring competencies, taking risks, solving problems, embracing contradictions, innovative thinking, and connecting, synthesizing and transforming ideas. Scores on individual rubric items as well as the total rubric score were compared to course outcomes including prototype grade and communication grade, as well as project group characteristics. Analysis was performed using Pearson's Product Moment correlation. In addition, alumni jury evaluations of the projects were also examined to see if projects with high creative thinking scores were also perceived as successful by outside observers. Of the VALUE items, the ability to connect, synthesize, and transform ideas was most highly correlated with the total creative thinking score (P<.001, α = .05). Total creative thinking was positively correlated with high prototype scores (P = .048) and in particular the ability to embrace contradictions was highly correlated with high prototype scores (P = 0.007). Having a high creative thinking score was facilitated by having a high number of students on the team with a common native language. As the creativity skills were also strongly correlated with the communication grade, this seems to indicate that improving creativity requires improving communication between group members. As part of their evaluation, jurors are asked to name 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' teams. The average creative thinking score for successful groups (17.7/24) was significantly higher than the average for unsuccessful groups (9/24) at P = 0.001 and α = 0.05. These results demonstrate that creative thinking skills are highly valuable for developing successful projects that are also recognized as such by external evaluators. This validates the need to actively teach creative thinking skills. It also demonstrates that time spent on teaching communication skills within student teams is vital to enhancing creative thinking skills.

Am I Creative? The Impact of Creativity Intervention on Design Outcomes and Self-perception of Creativity

“…An activity strictly focused on creativity might have a greater impact on how students perceive their own creativity, not necessarily only creativity tied to engineering design. A level of high creativity is associated with several traits, two of them being self-confidence and an ability to independently judge your own work [21]. Instructors can have a direct impact on the selfconfidence their students have towards their creative capabilities by requiring creativity as a part of the curriculum [22].…”