Evaluating Design Project Creativity in Engineering Design Courses

Chiu, I.; Salustri, Filippo A.

doi:10.24908/pceea.v0i0.3088

Cited by 17 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…The focus on an outcome that satisfies specific customer needs and wants seen in various existing works led to the decision to focus on potential consumer products in the current study. Assessing creativity in capstone design courses generally builds on existing creativity assessment models, and can show positive correlations between novelty/usefulness and communication scores [13], which has also been noticed in the current work.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 74%

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

Smyser¹,

Gouldstone²

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings

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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.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 74%

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

Smyser¹,

Gouldstone²

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Creativity should be a vital part of engineering education as well as an important student outcome (Chiu and Salustri 2010) that contributes toward the workforce.…”

Section: The Importance Of Creativity and Innovation For Engineers Bementioning

confidence: 99%

Creativity and Innovation Among Science and Art

Charyton¹

2015

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“…(p.104) While emphasizing and teaching engineering design to students is seen as a positive and useful endeavor, assessing engineering design project remains a challenge for educators due to the open-ended nature of many engineering design problems (Bartholomew, 2017). Chiu & Salustri (2010) suggested peer evaluation and introducing experts to evaluate creativity in student design projects, while Dym et al (2005) reported the use of holistic judgment, rubrics, and combinations to assess the quality of project solutions. Further, Platanitis & Pop-Iliev (2010) suggested to use rubrics to evaluate engineering projects but raised important question around how to establish criteria for grading.…”

Section: Engineering Designmentioning

confidence: 99%