Creative writing exercises for engineers
I'm teaching a problem solving course for engineering students (most around 19 years old) and want to increase their creativity levels. Any ideas for writing/ thinking exercises that could inspire them?
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Your goal is to get your students to think about using standard skills in non-standard ways. Anyone can build a house; not everyone can build Fallingwater.
- Dig up classic engineering conundrums from the past (pyramids, aqueducts, dams) and ask your students how they would solve them.
- Find moderately ridiculous but not utterly implausible movie set pieces (Indiana Jones escaping from the rolling rock and shooting darts, not Indiana Jones surviving a nuclear test in a lead-lined refrigerator). Ask your students to design the traps.
- Watch some recent Mythbusters episodes. Particularly in the last five years, they've branched out from busting urban legends to testing pop culture myths and viral videos. Look at the kinds of myths they choose to test, and the methods they use, and see what could be adapted.
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First you need to remember that people are different. Some are most creative without rules, some are most creative when breaking rules and some are most creative within rules. The best creative engineers fall in the last category.
The rules that an engineer are bound by are physical (gravity, physical properties of beams, etc.) regulatory, and customer requirements. The responses should be embrace, accept and understand respectively.
Now for creative writing, many engineers have difficulty with this. (My Father is a great example, he can build the most unique and wonderful things, write great specifications and documentation, but is completely stymied by dialog.) To showcase their strengths I would start with a two part assignment where you first design something impossible, and then look at its impact on society. As to the impossible thing, you need specific rules on its design, but do not feel constrained in writing the rules to have them all make sense. Some people are less creative when they fully understand what they are trying to do, they just do it, When they are learning something they can play with it.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/16204. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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