Design Wars: Developing student creativity through competition

Design Wars was developed as a multi-disciplinary design competition in which teams of students receive the same assignment, materials, technology tools for communication and time to complete the project. The student teams were separated into two groups - the documentation team (in the “design office”) and the actualization team (on the “build floor”). They were tasked with designing, constructing, and documenting an engineered solution to a complex problem on site within eight hours, with all design decisions communicated between the two groups via mobile computing. The competition was developed to challenge the students´ creativity and communication skills; judging was based on the elements of creativity including originality, flexibility, fluency, elaboration and aesthetics. Additionally, students were judged on their ability to document their team´s decisions and alternative solutions. Because creativity in engineering is unsuccessful without functionality, the final projects were penalized if they failed in execution.