On Teaching and Assessing Engineering Innovation

Daniel Raviv, Florida Atlantic University

This presentation details evaluation of one facet of innovation: ideation. Over the past six years students were exposed to several idea generation methods in a problem-solving course at FAU. The students’ abilities to generate ideas were assessed: two problems were given to them in the beginning and towards the end of the semester, about which they were asked to generate ideas. The workshop will review problem-solving methods that were learned in class, including the Eight Dimensional Methodology for Innovative Thinking. Later, the
presenter will describe the assessment process, including method, data, and interpretation of results. The results are based mainly on the average number of solutions per student and the total number of different
solutions. The results show an average increase in the number of ideas by a factor of two and a half produced by about 130 participants.