Under the umbrella of the Imagination Research Projects Program, a three-year integrated project conducted by the College of Engineering and the Institute of Education, aiming to immerse creativity and innovation into engineering education has already come to an end in November 2017. During the past three years, it is observed that project achievement and performance has been restricted because of unclear cognition and understanding of creativity and innovation for participating teachers.
Therefore, teachers have not played the most important role to enhance today’s engineering education by inspiring creativity and imagination of students. In other words, not only students, teachers also need to be persistently educated in many aspects in order to possess sufficient
knowledge and capability to guide students for future engineering education. Another three-year project on cultivation of interdisciplinary professionals launched December 2016 to continue previous trend by embedding imagination and innovative thinking into current engineering education. In
addition, this project has an additional objective of connecting engineering education in universities to the real world. A lot of efforts have been made to shorten the gap between theoretical engineering courses in classrooms and practical engineering problems in industrial environment. Those attempts
include hands-on experiences in fundamental laboratory courses, calculation-based home works for fictitiously realistic engineering questions, and project-based capstone curriculum. However, most engineering teachers were well educated with engineering theories and concepts in mathematical and physical presentations. The disparity between contents in classrooms and practices in industry still exists. Limited knowledge and experience about actual industry business outside the campus happens to most engineering teachers in universities. For the purpose of elevating engineering teachers to a practical level close to the real world, this project focuses on assisting engineering teachers to absorb practical knowledge not in the engineering field from four different aspects. They are innovative thinking, entrepreneurial knowledge, industrial environment, and intellectual property and patent. This paper will describe the contents of the project and summarize preliminary results for the time being.
Keywords: Creativity and innovation, engineering education, interdisciplinary learning;
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