2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Creativity is the essence of Aerospace Engineering. However, most aerospace courses offered in academia does not teach creativity which is integral to technological breakthrough. At the University_____, the Ideation, Disruption and Aha (IDA) pedagogy developed by the Institute of Applied Creativity and Transformation (IACT) was successfully implemented in the sophomore level Introduction to Flight course to inspire applied creativity and humanity centered design using the concept of flight. The class was conducted in a non-conventional classroom (in an IACT art studio) which had a huge impact on the students’ engagement, interest and participation in class activities. Apart from developing students’ skillset in performing flight related analyses and calculations, the course also focuses on developing students’ mindset to use the skillset in creative ways through IDA pedagogy which satisfied the ten maxims of creativity in education. A semester long innovation challenge module on “How “flight” can be used on a day-to-day basis by a common man?” was incorporated using the pedagogy which lead to multiple ideas and prototypes using the concept of flight to solve the day-to-day crises of mankind. This challenge helped the students to experience an impact that they could make in the society with the tools they learned just from a sophomore level class. The scaffolding of this module and the concepts/skills that the students used to design and the analyze the prototypes is discussed. The Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network’s (KEEN) framework used to assess the module along with other Likert scale assessments showed that students acquired the creative confidence to seek opportunities which could lead to technological breakthrough.