VARIOUS CREATIVITY-RELATED TEST RESULTS FROM A CREATIVE ENGINEERING DESIGN COURSE: Brain Bias, Brainstorming and Visual Reasoning YONG SE KIM & SEONG-DAE KIM Sungkyunkwan University Korea 1. Introduction Abstract. Various creativity-related tests were conducted on the students of a freshman design course. They include a brain bias test, brainstorming test and visual reasoning. The results and implications of them are discussed in this paper. The Creative Engineering Design course at Sungkyunkwan University is a design course for freshman engineering students. The objective of the course is to educate engineering students the basic design qualities in creative problem solving. The course provides learning opportunities in pursuing design solutions through collaborative efforts of design team work as well as innovative and effective design ideation methods and design presentation skills. The learning activities are through several design projects, design presentation and critiquing sessions and design-build-test competition. Each student of the class will experience various team work situations, from a single person design assignment to small group quality function deployment project and to bigger group conceptual design project and design-build-test project with all difference compositions of the team members. In building the teams for the conceptual design project and the designbuild-test project, a personality test result of the students have been used so that well-balanced teams could be formed from the aspect of creativity modes based on personality. The personality-based creativity mode test used in our team building is based on the personality types of Jung (Jung 1921) and has been developed by D. J. Wilde of Stanford University where the same method is used in forming their student design teams (Wilde 1997; Wilde and Labno 2001).
2 YONG SE KIM & SEONG-DAE KIM In addition to Wilde s creativity mode test, the students in SKKU Creative Engineering Design course conducted a brain bias test (Carter and Russel 2001) and a form of Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) (Torrance and Ball 1984). 2. Visual Reasoning The ability of a design engineer to visualize and reason about geometric aspects of physical objects and processes is crucial to the success of their professional activities. The essential relation between design creativity and visual reasoning has been argued by many design educators (McKim 1972) and creativity researchers. Udall argued that the capability to see and integrate objects in various viewpoints (the lifting operation in mathematical jargon) is a decisive factor for design creativity (Udall 1996). As a way to test the student s capability in visual reasoning before they receive any form of education on the matter, we conducted a simple test composed of relating orthographic projections and pictorial projections of polyhedral solid objects. For example, so-called missing view problems have been given to the students without much explanation on how to solve the problems but with a very general introduction on perspective projection and orthographic projections. We wanted to test the student s uneducated visual reasoning capability as we tested their brain bias and personality. The missing view problem requires visually constructing a valid 3-D solid object by visually analyzing two 2-D orthographic projections, and forms the foundations of visual reasoning processes (See Figure 1 for an example of missing view problem). Though not used in Creative Engineering Design course, we are developing an intelligent tutoring system for visual reasoning so that a self-paced adaptive learning of visual reasoning can be possible (Kim et al 2001).? Top View Solid (pictorial view)? Front View Side View Figure 1. Example of a Missing View Problem
VARIOUS CREATIVITY-RELATED TEST RESULTS 3 3. Brain Bias Test Brain bias test was conducted on the subjects a few weeks prior to brainstorming. The brain bias test is based on the split-brain research of Dr. Roger Sperry (Carter and Russell 2001). According to his research, main features of left brain are parsing, successive or sequential, logical expression, focal perception, analytical, aggressive, sense of time, literal, linguistic/symbolic, verbal intelligence, intellect, quantifiable knowledge, and mathematical calculation. In short, left brain deals with conscious thought, logical analysis, outer awareness, use of language, method, and rules. On the other hand, main features of right brain are holistic, simultaneous, gestalt expression, oriented awareness, synthetic, passive present-mindedness, metaphorical, configurational, practical intelligence, sensuousness, experiential knowledge, and apprehension of patterns. In short, right brain deals with subconscious thought emotional reaction, inner awareness, use of intuition, and creativity (Carter and Russel 2001; Jaušovec 1999; Sperry 1974). Abridged form of the test in Workout for a Balanced Brain (Carter and Russell 2001) was used for brain bias test. This test shows how much (very high, high, increased, or slight) left brain biased and how much right brain biased the subject is. This test includes different kinds of tests, each designed to address a different facet of the brain. It is composed of tests named spatial awareness, missing piece, psychometric, numerical, visual analogy, speed, visual classification, little puzzles, verbal, visual sequence, visual shapes, word definition, visual creativity, agility of mind, and verbal analogy. The result of the brain bias test showed that about half of the subjects were more left brain biased and the other half were more right brain biased. 4. Brainstorming Test The total number of 162 students have joined the brainstorming test. All the students were divided into 27 teams based on the result of the brain bias test, and each team was composed of six members. Team organization is as follows: 9 left-biased teams: composed of six subjects all of whom are left brain biased. 9 right-biased teams: composed of six subjects all of whom are right brain biased. 9 mixed teams: composed of six subjects half of whom are left brain biased and the other half are right brain biased. Four different problems were given to all 27 teams. At the brainstorming session, ten minutes time duration was given for each problem. Open
4 YONG SE KIM & SEONG-DAE KIM problem with few constraint was given first and more complicated problems with more constrains were given afterward. Problems provided are as follow: Problem 1: What could be the new use of a brick? Problem 2: How could a basketball game be more advantageous for short players over tall players? Problem 3: How could we weigh a puppy, which moves continuously and is easily awakened by even a slightest touch while sleeping? Problem 4: Suppose that we have an L-shaped pipe that carries metal balls. The bent zone of this pipe easily wears due to the collision of metal balls. Unbending the pipe toward I-shape is not allowed. How could we prevent wear and tear of the pipe even though it still carries metal balls? Figure 2. Metal ball problem Before the brainstorming session, a recorder was selected from the team. All the ideas suggested by the team members were recorded using e-beam system. E-Beam system is a system for recognizing, recording, editing, saving, and displaying on monitor what is written on the white board. Any drawings or texts written on the white board using special board marker are recognized by two sensors attached on the board and all of them can be saved as still images or animation simultaneously. Some part of the drawings or texts can be corrected using special eraser. During brainstorming, the recorder wrote team members ideas on white board and every idea recorded on the board was saved in a computer connected at the same time. After all the teams conducted brainstorming, the ideas saved in the computer were retrieved and analyzed quantitatively on the fluency of each session. 5. Result of Experiment The result of the brainstorming was as follows. The brainstorming teams that have more than one absent member were not counted. Also, the teams that
VARIOUS CREATIVITY-RELATED TEST RESULTS 5 have more than one member who had not taken Brain Bias Test completely were not counted. The number in the table below is the mean number of ideas from each team: Problem Team Left-biased (n=8) Right-biased (n=9) Mixed (n=7) TABLE 1. Result of brainstorming Problem 1 Problem 2 Problem 3 Problem 4 Total 26.6 23.1 23.9 21.1 94.8 21.4 17.3 15.4 14.9 69.1 24.7 20.9 19.6 16.7 81.9 We can see from the result that left-biased team tends to generate more ideas on how to solve the given problems no matter what the problem is. It can be inferred that left brain biased people, who are characterized by conscious thought, logical analysis, use of language, method, and rules, outperform right brain biased people in finding ideas to solve given problems. The score of visual reasoning test was also compared between left brain biased subjects and right brain biased subjects. The result is as follows. The subjects who had not taken brain bias test completely were not counted in. The number in the table below is the mean score of visual reasoning test rescaled to 0 through 100: TABLE 2. Brain bias vs. visual reasoning Test Brain bias Visual reasoning test Left-biased (n=88) 33.5 Right-biased (n=92) 38.9 The result shows that visual reasoning is better performed by right brain biased people, who are characterized by configurational, sensuousness, and apprehension of patterns. 6. Conclusion In the Creative Engineering Design course, various creativity-related tests were taken and the results were discussed. The brainstorming test result shows that left brain biased people generated more ideas on how to solve given problems than right brain biased people do. This may indicate in adapting the rules and techniques of a simple brainstorming might need more
6 YONG SE KIM & SEONG-DAE KIM logical characteristics. We can infer that generating many ideas in a brainstorming session does not necessarily mean being more creative. On the other hand, we might argue that experiments conducted on brainstorming may not fully represent the real situations. Instead of counting the number of ideas generated for rather simple problems, more well-designed design tasks should be used to observe the group creativity in design. The visual reasoning test result shows that right brain biased people tends to outperform left brain biased people in visual reasoning as expected from the usual belief on the roles and characteristics of the right brain. As the tests have been conducted for the students of a regular course, we could not attempt to make rather serious experiments because the course grade of each student could not be compromised for the research aspect of the tests and assignments. We deliberately informed the students that the test results of brainstorming and visual reasoning would not be counted for the grade, and these were taken for some research purposes. In this way, we could not ask for much of student s time in participating in the tests. Still, the test results will help identify strength and weakness of students in design creativity and recognize what kind of training is needed for the students. Developing computer-based tools to provide adaptive learning for each student in enhancing various design qualities of the student would make the greatest contribution on design education. With this belief, our group has been developing intelligent tutoring software systems for visual reasoning. We hope that such a tool would help in observing the process of creativity-related learning of individual students. Acknowledgement The contributions of all the students and teaching assistants of the Creative Engineering Design course of Spring 2002 are greatly appreciated. The research was supported in part by Korea Science and Engineering Foundation, U.S. National Science Foundation and Korea Institute of Science & Technology. References Carter, P and Russell, K: 2001, Workout for a Balanced Brain: Exercises, Puzzle & Games to Sharpen Both Sides of Your Brain, Quarto Inc. Hubbard, C, Mengshoel, O, Moon, C, Kim, YS: 1997, Visual Reasoning Instructional Software System, Computers and Education 28(4). Jaušovec, N: 1999, Brain Biology and Brain Functioning, Encyclopedia of Creativity, Academic Press, pp. 203-212. Jung, CG: 1990(German original published in 1921), Psychological Types, Chapter X, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
VARIOUS CREATIVITY-RELATED TEST RESULTS 7 Kim, YS, McRoy, S, and Dicker, J: 2001, Korea/U.S. Collaborative Research on Intelligent Tutoring System for Visual Reasoning in Engineering and Architecture, Proc. Int l. Conf. Computers in Education, Seoul, Korea, Nov. McKim, R: 1972, Experiences in Visual Reasoning, Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, Monterey, CA. Rickards, T: 1999, Brainstorming, Encyclopedia of Creativity, Academic Press, pp. 219-228. Sperry, RW: 1974, Lateral Specialization in the Surgically Separated hemispheres, In Schmitt, FO and Worden, FG (Eds.), Neurosciences: Third Study Program, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Torrance, EP and Ball, OE: 1984, Torrance test of creative thinking: Revised manual, Scholastic Testing Services, Bensenville, IL. Torrance, EP: 1990, The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking: Norms-technical manual, Scholastic Testing Service Inc., Bensenville, IL. Udall, N: 1996, Creative transformation: A design perspective, Journal of Creative Behavior, 30(1), pp. 3951. Wilde, DJ, and Labno, DB: 2001, Personality and the Creative Impulse, unpublished manuscript. Wilde, DJ: 1999, Design Team Roles, Proc. ASME Intl. Conf. on Design Theory and Methodology, Las Vegas, Sep.