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Creativity Training for Future Engineers: Preliminary Results from an Educative Experience

Due in part to the increased pace of cultural and environmental change, as well as increased competition due to globalization, innovation is become one of the primary concerns of the 21st century. We present an academic course designed to develop cognitive abilities related to creativity within an engineering education context, based on a conceptual framework rooted in cognitive sciences. The course was held at École Polytechnique de Montréal (ÉPM), a world renowned engineering school and a pillar in Canada's engineering community. The course was offered twice in the 2014-2015 academic year and more than 30 students from the graduate and undergraduate programs participated. The course incorporated ten pedagogical strategies, including serious games, an observation book, individual and group projects, etc., that were expected to facilitate the development of cognitive abilities related to creativity such as encoding, and associative analytical thinking. The CEDA (Creative Engineering Design Assessment) test was used to measure the students' creativity at the beginning and at the end of the course. Field notes were taken after each of the 15 three-hour sessions to qualitatively document the educative intervention along the semester and students gave anonymous written feedback after completing the last session. Quantitative and qualitative results suggest that an increase in creativity is possible to obtain with a course designed to development cognitive abilities related to creativity. Also, students appreciated the course, found it relevant, and made important, meaningful learnings regarding the creative process, its cognitive mechanism and the approaches available to increase it.