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Design Wars: Developing Student Creativity Through Competition Preston Oihus, Andrea Surovek, and Dean Jensen South Dakota School of Mines and Technology Rapid City, SD Abstract— Design Wars was developed as a multi-disciplinary design competition in which teams of students receive the same assignment, materials, technology tools for communication and time to complete the project. The student teams were separated into two groups – the documentation team (in the “design office”) and the actualization team (on the “build floor’). They were tasked with designing, constructing, and documenting an engineered solution to a complex problem on site within eight hours, with all design decisions communicated between the two groups via mobile computing. The competition was developed to challenge the students’ creativity and communication skills; judging was based on the elements of creativity including originality, flexibility, fluency, elaboration and aesthetics. Additionally, students were judged on their ability to document their team’s decisions and alternative solutions. Because creativity in engineering is unsuccessful without functionality, the final projects were penalized if they failed in execution. Keywords—creativity self-assessment, design competition, mobile computing, team design I. INTRODUCTION Creativity is a core competency for engineers, fundamental to the process of innovation. The US National Academies of Engineering specifically call out creativity as a necessary attribute of future engineering school graduates [1]; despite this and the fact that creativity and innovation are ubiquitous terms in discussions of the role of engineering in today’s society, the need to develop creativity as a skill has not developed a stronghold in traditional engineering curriculum. Kazerounian and Foley [2] suggested that creativity is not valued in current engineering education because it is antithetical to concepts of accuracy, certainty and risk limitation inherent in the practice of engineering. Creativity is also potentially stifled with the current engineering education practice when efforts are focused on determination of the single “right answer” that should be reached as efficiently as possible. This focus on a single answer determination is one pedagocial approach that may be detrimental to the development of creativity and divergent thinking, requisite skills for finding the solution of open ended design problems. In considering the difference between beginning designers and informed designers, Crismond and Adams [3] note that one attribute of informed designers is fluency, or the number of ideas generated before settling on a solution. This identified component of creativity [4] is not developed in determining solutions of highly constrained problems. Modern design dictates that engineers need to be agile, be able to work in teams, and able to converge on innovative solutions to complex problems [1]. How big of a role individual versus team creativity plays in design processes is not entirely understood and may play a role in the educational development of engineers. II. MOTIVATION Perhaps the most commonly known historical example of mobile computing and team based engineering occurred on April 13-17, 1970, when astronauts on the Apollo 13 mission worked simultaneously with mission command engineers to ensure the safe return of the crew. While much of the traditionally-defined “engineering” occurred on earth, implementation and validation of the design needed to occur at a distance of nearly 200,000 miles. This real-time, critical solution was an early validation of a concept articulated over 30 years later in the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) report, “The Engineer of 2020” [1], that engineers to exhibit numerous attributes and skills including (but not limited to): Strong analytical skills Practical ingenuity. Creativity Good communication Leadership Dynamism, agility, resilience, and flexibility (DARF). Design Wars, a day-long team design competition, was initially developed to provide students with an opportunity to showcase and developed the skills of the Engineer of 2020, with an emphasis on communication, creativity and DARF. More specifically, Design Wars was a multi-disciplinary design competition in which teams of students receive the same assignment, materials, technology, tools for communication, and time to complete the project. By assessing individual creativity prior to an open-ended design competition, it might be possible to identify any correlations that may be present between creativity and the success of the designs constructed in the event. A research question that arose from the development of the competition was how much impact individual creativity had on the overall creative output of the team. According to Razzouk and Shute [5] design thinking is generally defined as an analytic and creative process that engages a person in opportunities to 978-1-4673-5261-1/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE

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Design Wars: Developing Student Creativity Through Competition

Preston Oihus, Andrea Surovek, and Dean Jensen South Dakota School of Mines and Technology

Rapid City, SD

Abstract— Design Wars was developed as a multi-disciplinary design competition in which teams of students receive the same assignment, materials, technology tools for communication and time to complete the project. The student teams were separated into two groups – the documentation team (in the “design office”) and the actualization team (on the “build floor’). They were tasked with designing, constructing, and documenting an engineered solution to a complex problem on site within eight hours, with all design decisions communicated between the two groups via mobile computing. The competition was developed to challenge the students’ creativity and communication skills; judging was based on the elements of creativity including originality, flexibility, fluency, elaboration and aesthetics. Additionally, students were judged on their ability to document their team’s decisions and alternative solutions. Because creativity in engineering is unsuccessful without functionality, the final projects were penalized if they failed in execution.

Keywords—creativity self-assessment, design competition, mobile computing, team design

I. INTRODUCTION Creativity is a core competency for engineers, fundamental

to the process of innovation. The US National Academies of Engineering specifically call out creativity as a necessary attribute of future engineering school graduates [1]; despite this and the fact that creativity and innovation are ubiquitous terms in discussions of the role of engineering in today’s society, the need to develop creativity as a skill has not developed a stronghold in traditional engineering curriculum. Kazerounian and Foley [2] suggested that creativity is not valued in current engineering education because it is antithetical to concepts of accuracy, certainty and risk limitation inherent in the practice of engineering. Creativity is also potentially stifled with the current engineering education practice when efforts are focused on determination of the single “right answer” that should be reached as efficiently as possible.

This focus on a single answer determination is one pedagocial approach that may be detrimental to the development of creativity and divergent thinking, requisite skills for finding the solution of open ended design problems. In considering the difference between beginning designers and informed designers, Crismond and Adams [3] note that one attribute of informed designers is fluency, or the number of ideas generated before settling on a solution. This identified component of creativity [4] is not developed in determining solutions of highly constrained problems. Modern design dictates that engineers need to be agile, be able to work in

teams, and able to converge on innovative solutions to complex problems [1]. How big of a role individual versus team creativity plays in design processes is not entirely understood and may play a role in the educational development of engineers.

II. MOTIVATION Perhaps the most commonly known historical example of

mobile computing and team based engineering occurred on April 13-17, 1970, when astronauts on the Apollo 13 mission worked simultaneously with mission command engineers to ensure the safe return of the crew. While much of the traditionally-defined “engineering” occurred on earth, implementation and validation of the design needed to occur at a distance of nearly 200,000 miles. This real-time, critical solution was an early validation of a concept articulated over 30 years later in the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) report, “The Engineer of 2020” [1], that engineers to exhibit numerous attributes and skills including (but not limited to):

• Strong analytical skills

• Practical ingenuity.

• Creativity

• Good communication

• Leadership

• Dynamism, agility, resilience, and flexibility (DARF).

Design Wars, a day-long team design competition, was initially developed to provide students with an opportunity to showcase and developed the skills of the Engineer of 2020, with an emphasis on communication, creativity and DARF. More specifically, Design Wars was a multi-disciplinary design competition in which teams of students receive the same assignment, materials, technology, tools for communication, and time to complete the project.

By assessing individual creativity prior to an open-ended design competition, it might be possible to identify any correlations that may be present between creativity and the success of the designs constructed in the event. A research question that arose from the development of the competition was how much impact individual creativity had on the overall creative output of the team. According to Razzouk and Shute [5] design thinking is generally defined as an analytic and creative process that engages a person in opportunities to

978-1-4673-5261-1/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE

experiment, create and prototype models, gather feedback, and redesign. While the competition setting was designed to require some degree of adaptability by the teams, it also provided some time for reflection and incubation of ideas prior to design implementation.

Students performed an online, self-assessment of their creativity prior to the competition, the CREAX self-assessment (available at http://www.creax.com/csa/). The self-assessment was developed by the CREAX company in Belgium and breaks down creativity into eight components: abstraction, connection, perspective, curiosity, boldness, paradox, complexity, and persistence. The CREAX includes 40 question: six demographic, 25 self-description, five word-association (testing connection), three visual tests of abstraction and one verbal test of fluency. Validation studies on the CREAX self-assessment were unavailable, so results have been used for preliminary comparison without in-depth examination of statistical significance.

III. THE DESIGN WARS COMPETITON The design problem with which student teams were taked

was to move a tennis ball from a blue foam disk, to a French fry basket attached to the top of a four foot tall closet pole (see Fig. 1). The pole was placed in a five gallon bucket with sand in it for stabilization. The ball and foam were placed on one end of two-foot by eight-foot sheet of plywood, and the basket/bucket assembly was placed at the other end at a distance of six feet. Participants were then simply told “Your goal is to get the tennis ball from the piece of blue foam to the French fry basket.” Virtually no limitations were set on how students were to achieve this goal, except that, for safety reasons, they were not allowed to use electricity or fire in their final design. Many teams eventually realized that this lack of limits meant that the original configuration of the basket and disk could be altered, although some did not move either element. The only other rule was that students could only touch their design once at the beginning to start the movement of the ball, similar to rules for the Rube Goldberg competition.

Fig.1. A Design Wars booth (pre-construction) including the disk and basket initial configuration and student selected materials.

The central theme of the competition was to challenge both the students’ creativity and communication skills. The four-member student teams were separated into two groups. Two members were the documentation team (located in the “Design Office”) and the remaining two members comprised the

actualization team (on the “Build Floor’). For communication, students were allowed to use their tablet computers and whatever software they chose to employ. Wireless internet was provided and the use of any other communications hardware (e.g. cell phones) was not allowed. The actualization team was responsible for construction. The documentation team had to accurately document the design, including considered alternatives, so that it would match the constructed solution despite having no physical presence on the build floor.

The Build Floor layout consisted of 16 curtained-off booths on an arena floor, with two work tables and power outlets in each. A large central tool station was provided, and a check out system for tool usage time was implemented. A large assortment of construction materials and carefully selected “junk”, primarily donations from local businesses, were distributed about the perimeter of the booths. Also, despite the abundance of variety, there was not a large enough quantity of any single item (other than fasteners), so that all teams could use the same material. One attribute of this was that teams were required to quickly adapt their designs, or demostrate agility, if a material they had chosen was gone before they were abe to obtain it from the materials area.

In order to stress the importance of the mobile computing component of the competition, build teams on the floor were not allowed to touch any materials for the first half of the event. Instead, the build team had to communicate what materials were available to the design team and, with their help, pre-design their final configuration. The intent was to prevent teams from simply throwing things together to see what would work. In the afternoon, build teams were let loose to grab what they needed and follow the plans determined by all the members of the team. This provided an opportunity (albeit a short one) for incubation, a necessary component in creative development of ideas [6]. A three hour window for building was used to provide some sense of urgency in the build process. The format provided an environment (or the fourth p of creativity, “press”) with equal opportunity to succeed, while setting time and material constraints that required unique solutions.

At the end of the build phase, team members from both the design office and the build floor were brought to the floor, and the teams deployed their designs (See Fig. 2). Scoring was based on the sub-elements of creativity: originality, flexibility, fluency, elaboration and aesthetics as described by Kaufman et al [4].

The other portion of the design score was functionality. Engineering creativity may be considered to differ from creativity in other domains because of the requirement of functionality [7]. If the final design was unable to complete the required task of moving the ball, teams were given fifteen minutes to make modifications, and then allowed to retry. The final projects were penalized if they failed in execution in the two trials.

These two trials were judged by experts from varying disciplines (Psychology, Military Aviation Consulting, Mechanical/Electrical Engineering, Industrial/Human Factors Engineering). To consider the communication skills exhibited during the competition, students were judged on their ability to

document their team’s decisions and alternative solutions. The final criteria, which was used to prevent teams from hoarding materials, was the usage efficiency of the materials for construction of the design. If students took materials from the main pile of available materials, the team was required to use them or they received a penalty.

IV. COMPETITION DATA COLLECTED The Design Wars competition was held on Saturday,

September 8, 2012 at the Rapid City Civic Center. Sixteen teams of four students each, self-selected from the undergraduate population of the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology participated. Data collected included pre-competition, judging scores and post-competition surveys.

Pre-competition creativity scores, based on the CREAX self-assessment, were requested prior to the competition, and obtained from all but three of the participants. One of the main goals was to determine if a team’s score in the competition pointed to any correlations between individual creativity and team design output.

The spreadsheets accounting for each team’s judging scores and material efficiencies were kept for correlation with the individual CREAX data for each team. After the judges finished assessing the functionality, the top three teams, as computed across all the criteria, were awarded monetary prizes.

Figure 2. A Design Wars final design in demonstration.

A. Post-Competition Data and Mobile Computing Survey A post-competition survey was administered to all

participants to assess a) their perceptions of their creative output during the competition and b) their use of mobile compution for communication. The mobile computing ability of teams was crucial to their success in communicating ideas, designing solutions, and formulating contingency plans. During the competition, the wireless bandwidth was limited, which impacted the manner in which student teams were able to communicate. Data were also collected relating to their design strategies and individual/team interactions.

V. PRELIMINARY RESULTS Analysis indicated almost no linear correlation between

team performance on the creativity criteria average and the mean of the individual CREAX scores for a team. However, by grouping the teams a counter-intutive pattern emerged: it appears that the teams comprised of members with near CREAX mean scores performed better than teams with lower than average CREAX means, and both performed better than teams comprised of higher than CREAX mean individuals. Numerous questions that arises from this is: could it be that it is not a good idea to try to form teams of highly creative individuals (at least within a discipline)? Does time constrainst affect the ability of teams with highly creative members to develop functional solutions?

Synthesis among team members and an ability to communicate changes “on-the-fly” were paramount to success in the competition, which is strongly related to perspective, connection, and persistence – all aspects rated in the CREAX test. The analysis shows that students may possess numerous creative abilities, but may not actively realize they are using them or even believe they have them. This might explain why creativity is viewed as an abstract, unrelated section of an engineers’ toolbox. These creative, and riskier, designs may provide a better solution in the end or change what common opinion feels is “certain” in practice. Engineering as a whole requires many of the critical traits related to creativity, and developing those attributes in coursework could help students develop more of the traits considered desirable for the engineer of 2020 [1].

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Design Wars was funded by a State of South Dakota

Mobile Computing Grant. The research team would also like to thank the local businesses that donated materials and services, the judges, and student participants and volunteers.

REFERENCES [1] National Academies of Engineering. (2004) “The Engineer of 2020

Visions of Engineering in the New Century.” The National Academies Press. Washington, DC

[2] Kazerounian, K and Foley, S. (2007). “Barriers to Creativity in Engineering Education: A Study of Instructors and Students Perceptions”. Transactions of the ASME, Vol. 129, 761-768.

[3] Crismond, D., and Adams, R. (2012). The informed design teaching and learning matrix. Journal of Engineering Education 101 (4): 738–797.

[4] Kaufman, James C., Plucker, Jonathan A., and Baer, John (2008), Essentials of Creativity Assessment, John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, NJ 220 pp.

[5] Rizzouk, R. and Shute, V. (2012) “What is design thinking and why is it important?,” Review of Educational Reseaerch, vol. 82 (3), 2012, pp. 330–338.

[6] Kaufman, J. C. (2009), Creativity 101, Springer Publishing, New York, NY, 242 pp.

[7] Cropley, D. H. and Cropley, A. J. (2005). Engineering creativity: A systems concept of functional creativity. In J. C. Kaufman and J. Baer (Eds.), Creativity Across Domains: Faces of the Muse, Chapter 10 (pp. 169-185). New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.