Instructor approaches to creativity in engineering design education

Creativity is essential in the engineering design process. Researchers, academics, educators, and engineering organisations all agree that further improvement is necessary in training methods for fostering creativity in engineering education. Even though studies exist about how creativity should be taught in engineering education, there is still limited research about the challenges of practical implementation. To address this gap, an action research project has been conducted in two undergraduate Mechanical Engineering design subjects at a prominent university in Australia with the aim of enhancing creativity during the problem-solving process. The study shows the many challenges that arose when enhancing creativity in engineering design education, and the issues that surrounded this implementation. Although teaching creativity to engineering students is a challenge, this study illuminates the difficulties of convincing the engineering instructors to embed creativity in the subjects they teach. Overall, the study found that instructors' understandings and beliefs about creativity influence their teaching approach and what they value. These influences were around four main areas: t