Influence of integrating creative thinking teaching into project-based learning courses to engineering college students

In Taiwan, teachers of engineering colleges mostly focus on the innovation and breakthrough of engineering technologies that makes students possibly are limited to the system functionality and integrity. In other words, because of the lack of creative thinking developing and training, students tend to be limited in their creativity when they are doing their homework. However, as the matures of engineering technologies, engineering is transformed to the creative applications of scientific theories that often as unique creations to herald their existence, thus creativity is thought of as the innate character of engineering in future [1-3]. Accordingly, many research approaches have been arisen that aim to enhance creativity in engineering education, such as Project-Based Learning (PBL) that is often adopted for problem solving, self-learning, and leadership skill. The main concept of PBL is that capturing students' interest via the illustration of real world problems, then arise students thinking of applying new knowledge in order to solve the problems [4-6]. This study focuses on integrating creative thinking teaching into PBL courses. In order to push the students in the course can inspire their imagination and creativity effectively, the five stages of project-based teaching period is adopted. Students? creativity analysis was conducted and the results indicated: 1) students significantly enhanced their intrinsic motivation and thinking relationship of self-learning; 2) the evaluation results and teacher assessment results were without significant differences, indicating that approach of integrating creative thinking teaching into project-based learning courses could be perceived as a valid teaching method; 3) the feedback of student learning process and the score of expert creative assessment were highly consistent.