Development, Implementation, and Assessment of a Creative Additive Manufacturing Design Assignment: Interpreting Improvements in Student Performance

The purpose of this article is to present a design for additive manufacturing assignment focused on creativity rather than functionality and to analyze its results (N = 70) acquired during five years. The assignment teaches the unique advantages of additive manufacturing to engineering students and encourages learning from failure to achieve designs that are possible to manufacture. The students of the course assignment were in their fourth year of studies and pursued master’s degrees in mechanical engineering. The article presents the design for additive manufacturing course assignment in enough detail for it to be applied by educators in the sphere of additive manufacturing. The result assessment is performed with a numerical method and a jury method. The statistical significance of the correlation of the numerical approach with the jury approach is evaluated. The study conducts a multi-point creativity assessment on a large sample of parts created by students acquired over five years with the support of 10 jury members. This assessment process gives insight on how creativity in design for additive manufacturing can be quantified and can be readily applied by educators. The data of the jury evaluation are verified with an interrater reliability evaluation. Our results indicate that conducting the course assignment for multiple years increases the quality of the student work. The improvement of the results is theorized to be partly due to students gaining inspiration from an increasing number of high-quality parts from previous years of the assignment. The numerical method of result assessment can be used for evaluation when resources are scarce; however, the jury method should be used if possible.