OTSM-TRIZ Games: Enhancing Creativity of Engineering Students

Abstract

Enhancing the ability of solving non-typical problems especially in engineers is an important issue for any R&D&I department. Consequently, some initiatives have been launched recently to foster new educational approaches and methods.The system of OTSM-TRIZ games, developed by Tatiana Sidorchuk and Nikolai Khomenko, proposes a series of games for 3-8 years old kids to lead them thinking according to the OTSM-TRIZ postulates and models, without learning TRIZ tools directly. This paper postulates that these games can be efficiently used also for stimulating creativity of engineering students, with interesting insights on their behaviors when challenged through unexpected situations and tasks. Some of these games have been tested both with 12 years old Iranian kids and with MS students in Mechanical Engineering of Politecnico di Milano. The research shows improvement in creativity indexes for MS engineering students under the condition of the proposed experiment.First, in the paper a thorough description of the classical OTSM-TRIZ games is provided. Then, after presenting the experimental activities run with kids and university students, their behavior is discussed so as to extract some general guidelines about the implementation of these educational practices in different contexts, as well as some preliminary assessment on the resulting outcomes.