Balancing Academic Rigor and Creative Thinking: A Transformational Approach to Teaching Senior Design.

Innovation arises from creativity. "Thinking outside the box" has long been seen as a necessary precursor to innovation and invention in engineering. However, creativity is rarely part of traditional engineering curricula. In 2015, our group began to explore integrating theater-based creativity methods into bioengineering capstone design. Evaluation of student outcomes was encouraging, so we continued to develop the course in 2016 and 2017. As we worked to refine the pedagogical process, we discovered tensions (real or perceived) between providing academic rigor and allowing students to embrace their creativity; for instance, we experienced some resistance from engineering faculty and students toward adopting methods they viewed as "artsy" or lacking academic rigor. Here, we discuss the tensions we observed offer potential ways to mitigate such tensions and begin to consider how to expand on our successes.