The exponential impact of creativity in computer engineering education

Embedded computers continue to show a relentless pace of improvement with better technologies at greater levels of integration for ever broader application domains. Furthermore, access to such technology keeps on becoming easier and cheaper: design kits, design examples, data sheets and application notes all are just a mouse-click away. This, however, did not make learning and education of computer engineering techniques any easier: the basics of computer engineering remain the same, but the tower of complexity keeps growing higher. This paper highlights creativity as a fundamental quality that computer engineering students need to cultivate to master modern technology. We propose open-ended design practice as an essential tool to nurture creativity. We report on the results and lessons learned from an embedded-systems design course which we organized for the past 7 years. An important observation is that creativity has an exponential impact on the quality of design delivered by students, when quality is measured by factors such as performance, power, and cost. This means that the best students make designs that are literally orders of magnitude better than those from weaker students, even for students in the same class and the same curriculum. In this paper, we do not intend to explain the causes of this difference. Rather, we analyze what can be done with creativity in a classroom setting, and we provide examples from our past courses.