Crack the Code: Impact of Engineering Design Prompt Objective and Linguistic Characteristics on Understanding and Creativity Perceptions of Students

Abstract The current engineering education places a heavy emphasis on fostering creative and innovative problem-solving skills of students. One of the crucial factors of the creative design process that is linked to students’ creative outputs is the design prompt they receive. More specifically, it was found that slight variations in the design prompt, or whether the design prompt is easy to understand can significantly influence the students’ performance. However, the construction of design prompts, which is a crucial component of a design project, has received relatively little attention when compared with research on other steps of the design process. Therefore, the current work seeks to contribute to this gap in research by exploring 45 design prompts at their objective and text level using linguistic characteristics to investigate what could influence students’ perception of its readability and creativity. The results of this study show that at the text level, the overall objective only differed significantly in terms of word prevalence. The three objective groups studied here varied minimally in terms of their understandability and creativity perception. Finally, it was found that both the objective and the linguistic characteristics were unable to predict the percentage of people in each answer category for understandability and creativity. These results contribute towards understanding the construction of design prompts, as well as pointing out additional areas of future research in this area.