Abstract:

For the twenty-first century, creativity and innovation are leading topics in many scenarios (i.e. social, business, technological, etc.). For this reason, many courses in engineering degrees have developed their syllabus considering creativity and innovation in their educational activities. However, creativity is a highly ambiguous concept and tends to have different meanings depending on the field to which it is applied. Furthermore, in engineering education an additional problem is found, which is how students understand the term creativity in their professional activities. Usually, they are confused about this topic and misunderstand concepts such as creativity and innovation. In this work, an empirical survey is presented to determine the perception of the students on creativity and how they use these skills in their work. The research work explores different topics that are necessary to be considered when creativity is developed in the classroom.

The work points out that the way in which the instructors organize the lessons has an important influence on students learning. It is an instructor’s task to design an effective activity and encourage students to think creatively. To this end, specific activities are scheduled and included in the class. When this task is carried out properly, the students can develop creative designs with confidence. However, it is not easy to design effective lessons and activities. In the methodology proposed the students are divided into groups and each group has to work on a very simple design task.

The activity has five stages, which are:
(1) training in creativity and innovation,
(2) comprehension of the design problem,
(3) generation of ideas,
(4) reduction of ideas, and
(5) refinement.

Questionnaires are designed by the instructors to find out how the students understand creativity in design. In these questionnaires, the opinion of the student is reflected at different stages, i.e. before, during and after the work is concluded. In this way, the comparison of the answers provides the changes in the perception of the students about creativity and these modifications are highlighted in the conclusions

Keywords:

Creativity, innovation, industrial engineering, design.