Igniting Creativity and Innovation in Engineering Students: The Case for Technology and Society Courses in Engineering Curricula

Engineering educators have long struggled with coaxing creativity from their students, given the massive amount of prescriptive material that must be covered in their curricula. If students want to graduate in four years, they have very limited time to explore unique interests outside of their specific engineering discipline. A technology and society course offers a tremendous opportunity to bring in material relevant to engineering students at a personal and professional level, and demonstrates applications of skills they are learning in their quantitative courses. This paper describes such a course taught at the University of Calgary that is structured to motivate innovation and entrepreneurship, and to empower students to envision the positive change they can make with skills they have acquired throughout their education. The course consists of over 120 students from second year to fifth year, from all disciplines of engineering offered at the school. The sheer number and diversity of the students required flexibility in material and assessment. As such, the students were given the open prompt of finding a social problem they care about, and devising a technological solution to address it. They were encouraged to consider their solution all the way to implementation, which would require tasks such as talking to regulators, conducting market research, and running surveys. In addition, the students were coached to consider multiple dimensions of framing an engineering problem and solution, as well as how to pitch their ideas targeting four bottom lines: technical acumen, social benefit, environmental impact, and economic viability. In a course that has traditionally been viewed simply as a necessary requirement, many students came alive. Some students are exploring patent options for their innovations, others soliciting partnerships with sports franchises, and others acquiring summer internships as a result of their projects. This paper presents student assessment on the social dimensions of engineering as well as their ability to make a difference in the world, as a consequence of this course. In its inception, the field of engineering was defined by creativity and innovation. Monumental changes in human welfare throughout history have been linked to engineering advances, such as the steam engine in the Industrial Revolution and the proliferation of personal computers in the Information Age. Yet paradoxically, traditional engineering education has become prescriptive, hammering students with a slew of equations and rules to solve them. While students have become masters at solving problems with defined parameters similar to those given in their assignments and exams, they become flustered when pushed beyond those comfort zones. Some have argued that this kind of curriculum not only fails to foster creativity, it actually stifles ingenuity, inhibiting innovation to solve the world’s greatest problems We sought to reverse this negative association between creativity and engineering education by motivating a large engineering class with a combination of Ethic of Care and entrepreneurship. Ethic of Care is a concept grounded on value-guided practices to meet the needs of those receiving the care, within a framework of justice and rights. By incorporating a wider view of stakeholders and their relationships in the engineering design process, this combination is able to spark creativity sourced from two distinct avenues: deeply rooted motivations derived from the students’ personal values and ethos that is independent of their coursework, versus the excitement of innovation and bringing something new into the world. In terms of concrete parameters for evaluating engineering decisions, Ethic of Care brings to technical requirements the need to examine social and environmental ramifications of engineering design. The entrepreneurship element adds the perspective of economic viability and marketability, which ties engineering back to societal drivers. The ultimate goal is to empower students to feel a sense of agency to make a positive change in their world, despite being students still in the midst of their studies. This paper describes an innovative technology and society course made up of more than 120 students. The course is designed such that students can explore the creative nature of engineering and are exposed to the multiple facets and hurdles of implementing engineering solutions. The purpose of the course is to encourage the students to apply the skills they have learned thus far in their university education and to explore issues they care about by incorporating their personal values. In contrast to initiatives such as Engineers Without Borders and general engineering programs for green/sustainable design, this course is not elective and thus does not only target a select group of enthusiastic students that choose to partake in social engineering. Rather, the vast majority of the engineering student population at University of Calgary, where this is the most popular course out of three courses that fulfills a degree requirement, is exposed to this methodology. The other two courses are in the process of being phased out and this will be the only course to fulfill the requirement in the near future.