Preparing STEM Graduates for the Future through Cultivation of Creativity and Innovation, Integrated with Critical Thinking
Professor Melissa Knothe Tate Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering
When asked how can creativity and other“ soft skills” can amplify STEM skills for landing a first professional job and maximising professional and personal growth, I respond simply: Employers are seeking humans not robots. Professionals have specific skill sets. Personal growth means becoming your best person throughout life. Employers are seeking resilient, problem solving( innovative, critical thinking) employees with excellent listening skills, open minds, and a willingness to learn. Together these attributes embody lifelong learning [ 1 ].
Yet there is a difference between getting an education and seeking a job. Education is an aspirational pursuit. We never finish becoming educated, as there is always more to learn – that is the point of education! In this Do It Yourself( DIY) era, one might ask why go to uni at all? This is where the university defines its raison d ' être, as an institution and as a forum for dissemination and exposure to new and disruptive ideas, as well as a place to learn and practice critical thinking skills [ 2 ]. The university provides a unique environment to learn and to be mentored by thought leaders and global experts in the field [ 2 ].
An additional aspect of personal and professional growth is the capacity to appreciate ethical, interpersonal and communications challenges that one faces when applying STEM knowledge. In my BIOM9561 Mechanics of Biomaterials course, students have the opportunity to apply their core engineering knowledge in context of human health and devices designed to promote and preserve such health. I use the aforementioned paradigms in two, multi-week tutorials to
1. give the students the experience of working in a failure analysis team to determine root causes of failure in realistic medical device( wearables as well as implantables) failure scenarios; insodoing they engage with a client in a manner emulating a real professional engineering experience and
2. use blue sky design thinking processes to envision new, stimuli responsive biomaterials that solve currently unsolved problems in the human health and medical device arena. These tutorials give the students unique opportunities to foster personal and professional growth whilst digesting and integrating knowledge from different disciplines to solve real world, health related problems.
Yet, a major challenge in teaching and learning across disciplines is the capacity to understand how material learned in one context, e. g. cell biology, apply to a wholly different context, e. g. mechanics of natural materials. The power of empathy to enhance understanding, visualisation and problem solving strategies serves particularly well to address this challenge, e. g.“ Design thinking processes empower engineers to empathize with their cells, imagining and feeling what they experience and envisioning their responses. In empathising with their cells, engineers may be better equipped to prototype mechanoactive materials and architectures as cells do, from raw materials that they themselves produce and adapting their own structure and function, and ultimately their own niche to survive.” [ 3 ]
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