Promoting Creativity in Final Year Engineering Students' Project: a case study in the Smart Cities context

This paper describes a laboratory-like environment, aligned with the Smart City paradigm, aiming to foster creativity in engineering students, in ICT areas. Students should define and elaborate their project, which must be open enough to stimulate students' creativity and, at the same time, framed by a context that makes it an exciting initiative concerning real business. In a typical engineering laboratory, when defining this kind of activity, instructors (scholars or researchers) usually fall in one of two situations: 1) a very rigid project plan supported by a scholarship, oriented by requirements defined within a research project; or 2) a very academic exploratory project without clear short-term objectives, namely within the time the student will dedicate to it. Trying to avoid both perspectives usually is difficult, but subjects like Smart Cities, with a considerable innovation space, are clearly favorable to that goal. In this paper, starting from some models proposed to foster creativity in students, we will describe the steps taken to prepare a laboratory where students and companies can find an environment to promote creativity and critical thinking.