Evaluating the Effects of Higher Education in Mechanical Engineering on Divergent Thinking in Problem Solving

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: In the last half of the 20th century, academic excellence in engineering education was thought to be synonymous with learning skills associated with convergent thinking and production (Felder, 1988). Now, there has become a broader recognition that creativity and innovation abilities are essential to the success of engineers in the workplace. This recognition comes as today’s workplace is increasingly becoming an environment in which engineers tackle problems from broader perspectives with more interdisciplinary teams (Cropley, 2019; World Economic Forum, 2016; Rieken, 2017). In the present work, I aim to explore how higher education in mechanical engineering affects students’ creative approaches to solving an open-ended engineering design task. In doing so, I establish a framework to analyze different measures of creativity including fluency, novelty, elaboration, and completeness in a comparative study that evaluates 20 students majoring in mechanical engineering or psychology. Moreover, throughout this thesis, I uncover the underpinnings behind how mechanical engineering undergraduates explore decision-making pertaining to creativity and prototyping. The results of this study show a need to encourage mechanical engineering students to pursue additional ideas and to pursue these ideas to a greater extent. This work has implications for how future engineers integrate creativity into the workplace and how engineering is taught.

Author	Elaridi, Shadi
Thesis advisor	Sheppard, Sheri
Degree granting institution	Stanford University
Department	Department of Mechanical Engineering

DOI	https://doi.org/10.25740/kc246wk4441
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/kc246wk4441

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred citation: Elaridi, S. (2022). Evaluating the Effects of Higher Education in Mechanical Engineering on Divergent Thinking in Problem Solving. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/kc246wk4441

Undergraduate Theses, School of Engineering

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