Creativity and engineering education: Assessing the impact of a multidisciplinary project course on engineering students' creativity

Creativity is the essential driving force, and creative engineers are the drivers entrusted to propel the technologydriven industry to the pinnacle of innovations in all engineering sectors. Accordingly, creativity is being integrated into engineering education in different ways, from a single lecture to more extensive curriculum level approaches. In this paper, we measured the effect of a multidisciplinary project course, a joint effort between the School of Arts, Design and Architecture, and the School of Engineering, on students' creativity. In particular, we assessed the Originality, Novelty, and Quantity of solutions produced by participants in two tasks, an Alternate uses test and the ShapeStorm exercise. An alternate uses test assessed the written form of divergent thinking, and the ShapeStorm exercise assessed the visual form of divergent thinking. Statistical analysis of the data indicated that solutions for the written divergent thinking task produced by students postcourse were more novel than pre-course. We did not find a statistically significant improvement in the Quantity. Similarly, for the visual divergent thinking task, we see no statistically significant increase.