Development of technical creativity in higher education

Abstract

Technical higher education should provide to student/future engineer scientific and technical knowledge and skills for understanding and using various technical equipment, and also for designing and developing new or improved such equipment. In the paper, the necessity and some ways of developing the students’ technical creativity are approached. One may appreciate that there could be a certain correlation between the gross domestic product per capita, number of patents recorded yearly per million inhabitants and the interest directed to the stimulation of creativity in the technical higher education. Activities aiming the stimulation of students’ technical creativity, addressed in technical higher education system and the results obtained are presented. The experience accumulated in some universities of Romanian language is also succinctly described. The contents of university subjects aiming to provide to students knowledge and skills for developing their technical creativity are mentioned. Within applicative activities attached to these university subjects, various methods for stimulating the technical creativity were used. Thus, the students could learn ways in which they could find new or improved solutions for technical problems and also how they can protect the intellectual rights deriving from these solutions. The main conclusion refers to the importance of finding adequate ways and contents of activities aiming the stimulation of students’ technical creativity.