Using Educational Technology to Enhance Creative and Critical Thinking Skills Through Open Ended Design Projects

Engineering students must develop creative and critical thinking skills to become real world problem solvers. Syllabi and curricula must demonstrate adequate preparation of the student to face real world challenges. In this paper, we report on incorporation of educational technology into freshman and senior core chemical engineering courses that facilitate rigorous development of creative and critical thinking skills. We elaborate on the incorporation of POLYMATH® into these courses, and report on how the use of this technology, or equivalent, enables the straightforward inclusion of substantive openended design (OED) type projects. The courses each require year-level specific project-based deliverables that students work on in teams. The paper outlines key components of such exercises and articulates on the specifics of how these are assigned to students, the process by which the students work in collaborative groups and teams to develop the open-ended solution and discusses the rubric that students are provided so that they are aware of how the assessment and evaluation of their work will be conducted. The paper articulates on the components of the final report and presentations that the student's teams are expected to develop and deliver. The deliverable report requires the students to extract second order conclusions from the direct results from running the software. The technology rapidly produced results for engineering system models involving solution of coupled linear algebraic equations or coupled ordinary differential equations. Through these OED exercises, students were able to demonstrate their critical and creative thinking skills through focused reports that explored and articulated impacts of system variables and process parameters on system function.