The purpose of this study was to present the Creative Engineering Design Education(CEDE), a systematic and efficient education program, to improve the engineering beginners' creativity and engineering design abilities. To accomplish the goal of this s...
The purpose of this study was to present the Creative Engineering Design Education(CEDE), a systematic and efficient education program, to improve the engineering beginners' creativity and engineering design abilities. To accomplish the goal of this study, the CEDE program was developed and applied for the engineering beginners and the effect of the program in improving the beginners' creativity and engineering design abilities was examined.
In this study, the CEDE program was developed, based on ADDIE model which consists of the components of analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. The contents of the developed program were largely composed of creative engineering design theory and creative engineering design activities. The creative engineering theory was made up of the contents of the outline of engineering design, systematic design procedure, creative problem solving style and intellectual model, creative thinking development techniques, and TRIZ(theory of inventive problem solving). Teaching-learning methods such as lectures, presentation, discussion, practice, problem based learning(PBL), and cooperative learning were applied. Also, for creative engineering design activities, the engineering beginners were instructed to design water-driven cars, solar-energy cars, steamboats, ball classifier by using project methods.
To examine the effect of CEDE program, 180 freshmen students in a department of engineering participated in the experiment. A randomized solomon four-group experiment design which is a true experimental design was applied to the study. The independent variable of this study was CEDE program and the dependent variables were creativity and engineering design abilities. Those in the experiment group participated in the developed CEDE program for a two-hour long session that was held once a week for 15 consecutive weeks. A total number of hours they participated in the program was 30 hours. On the other hand, those in the comparison group participated in already existing engineering design program for the same period of time. To measure the engineering beginners' creativity, 'Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking(TTCT): Verbal, Figural' was used and the standard score was used as the test score. To measure the beginners' engineering design abilities, 'Structure Design Project' developed and verified by the experts, was used. The vertical load(kgf) to a destruction point of the structure was used as the test score. T-tests were conducted to assess the difference in average scores of creativity and engineering design abilities between the groups and the significance level was .05.
The major findings of the study were as follows:
First, the result of the program's effect on the improvement of creativity showed that there was a statistically significant difference in TTCT(Verbal) and TTCT(Figural) between the experimental and comparative groups. Also, the result of the program's effect on the improvement of the sub-components of creativity was as follows. In TTCT(Verbal), a statistically significant difference was found for fluency, flexibility, and originality components. For TTCT(Figural), there was a statistically significant difference found for fluency, elaboration, and creative strength. This finding suggests that the participants were able to practice creative thinking techniques for both divergent and convergent thinking through the program and by learning TRIZ. They were able to think about the discoveries of ideas from different angles. It also shows that the participants' creativity was improved through cognitive stimuli that were provided through a repeated process of producing, summarizing, and organizing ideas in the process of the creative engineering design activities.
Second, the result of the program's effect on engineering designing abilities showed that there was a statistically significant difference found between the experimental and comparative groups. This result shows that upon learning the steps of systematic design process and participating in the project of the actual creative engineering design activities, the participants improved their engineering design abilities by directly applying the process of idea exploration, planning, manufacturing, analyzing, testing, and evaluation.
Following suggestions were made for field-application and future research:
First, in order to make the developed CEDE program more sophisticated, the program must be applied more in teaching-learning settings at middle and high schools. Its effect must also be continuously examined and evaluated to assess the problems and the way to solve them should be discussed when needed.
Second, to effectively improve the learners' engineering designing abilities, standardized evaluation criteria which can efficiently evaluate the abilities in different aspects must be developed.
Third, various creative engineering design activities projects that can improve the engineering beginners' creativity and engineering design abilities according to each level must be developed and operated. Administrative and financial support for such process is also needed.