Abstract:

It’s widely accepted in higher education programs the importance of not only the knowledge but also the skills and competences in the students. One powerful way to develop generic competences in students is through creativity. Creativity is an innate capacity. It can be used to assure the learning and development of key skills. A lot of experiences have been developed in primary and secondary schools, but very few can be found in higher education. More over it is difficult to find experiences developed in technical and scientific studies. We present here an experience made by teachers worried about this task. To this aim the students were given a self-explicative template so they new in advance what does creativity means (description), how can it be developed (resources) and how it will be assessed (indicators and assessment tools). The experience made with engineering students increased the motivation level of our students. It was found out that engineers work allows some meeting of the related professional growth and the exercise of creativity. On the other hand, we found that critical thinking was specifically developed in them through this experience.

Keywords:

Creativity, competences, engineers, higher education.