Typical engineering courses emphasize closed-ended examples and problems. While these problems aid in the development of convergent thinking skills, they usually do not provide practice for improving the divergent thinking patterns essential for the solution of industrial and research problems. This proposal presents a plan for enhancing the problem-solving and synthesis skills of first-year engineering students to develop a mind-set lasting throughout their college careers and professional lives. This enhancement will be achieved through an innovative, required first-year course. In a first-year class of over 1,000 students, it is virtually impossible to achieve the ideal one-on-one interaction required to develop divergent thinking skills. In the proposed first-year course interactive computer modules and open-ended problems will be used in conjunction with lectures and exercises that present a robust problem solving heuristic. The computer modules will allow the students to make decisions in gray areas at branch points in decision trees, to troubleshoot, and to make decisions on what data they need to access from the computer. Our previous work on writing interactive modules has resulted in our developing strategies that individualize the instruction. The students will then work in groups to apply these concepts to solve open-ended design problems, written at such a level that first-year students will be able to generate innovative solutions. These group interactions, requiring a written report, will provide a framework to enhance the students' interpersonal and communications skills. The proposed project will initially have the potential to influence over 1,000 first-year engineering students. Further, the modules and material developed will then be distributed to other engineering colleges across the nation.
