Creativity development in engineering education: the case of mind mapping

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to exploit student preference and propose, discuss and experimentally validate a strategy that aims to reduce time necessary to introduce tutoring of mind mapping to engineering students. Design/methodology/approach - A survey instrument was designed and used to collect student preferences about mind mapping. Preferences were linked to alternative scenarios of mind mapping deployment. Survey responses from a 100 second-year students from the Department of Production Engineering and Management were analyzed using conjoint analysis. Findings - Results indicate that an effective strategy to present mind mapping to engineering students is to explain in detail all the possible applications of mind mapping; present mind maps with different colours using both words and drawings and encourage students to use mind maps in team assignments. Originality/value - The findings of this paper provide a well documented framework in addressing mind mapping technique to engineering students. The proposed framework tries to make the best use of the available time for creativity development programs, in engineering departments. This framework may also be applied to other creativity enhancing techniques, providing solutions for incorporating creativity in engineering curricula.