Enhancing student creativity through an interdisciplinary, project-oriented problem-based learning undergraduate curriculum

To develop the creativity needed to confront the multi-faceted challenges of 21st Century sustainable development goals (SDGs), university students urgently need a curriculum framed around their solving real-world problems, such as what a Project-Oriented, Problem-Based Learning (POPBL) curriculum offers. Moreover, to build a functionally sustainable future, students should develop creativity through an interdisciplinary lens. This study used a quasi-experimental design to explore the impact of an interdisciplinary POPBL course with a participatory design pedagogy on university students’ engineering creativity. Four professors from future studies, architecture, engineering, and education disciplines designed and implemented the experimental curriculum. The curriculum incorporated three key concepts around creative design thinking: participatory design, future thinking, and visual communication. The experimental group consisted of 19 undergraduate students in the Engineering Design for Society course. The control group of 23 Civil Engineering undergraduates participated in the Civil Engineering Design course. The findings are: (1) The experimental group received significantly higher creativity scores on fluency, flexibility, originality, and usefulness. (2) The control group's scores regressed on the post-test. (3) The experimental group's higher scores indicated that interdisciplinary POPBL instruction combined with participatory design pedagogy can promote interdisciplinary creativity. The researchers propose the term empathetic-future thinking to describe the participatory design pedagogy centred on community-based feedback and interdisciplinary communication and teamwork. By developing a sense of empathy for cross-domain cognition and the end-users of the design, students enhanced the originality and usefulness of their design. Educators should incorporate empathetic-future thinking to develop students’ engineering creativity for achieving 21st Century SDGs.