Virtual Creative Problem-solving Workshops

All levels of education are facing an unprecedented challenge because of the pandemic; therefore, instructors are making all kinds of efforts to ensure to keep the high-quality education and exploring diverse ways to reach out and engage students in the content delivered. We redesigned a creative problem-solving workshop for online settings to help students think more creatively in their class projects and practice a growth mindset. One of the primary objectives of the workshop is to increase students' awareness of cognitive biases, barriers, and traps that prevent individuals to be creative. The workshop program targets information technology and engineering classes that include significant design components. The workshop is delivered at the beginning of the semester in an hour guest-lecture format. The tools and techniques learned in the workshop can then be applied to subsequent design projects during the semester. The workshop instructors quickly adapted the workshop content to be delivered remotely in Fall 2020. The workshop exercise problems were created in the online format and made available for students through the course management system that the university uses. The evaluation of the workshop program showed that participating students found the workshop beneficial, and it introduced them to design thinking and creativity in both settings, in-person and remote. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the workshop did not diminish in the remote learning mode. In addition, Bono's Six Hats method, which was introduced in a faculty workshop and then applied extensively in the remote environment, had highly positive results.