Makerspace teaching-learning environment to enhance creative competence in engineering students

- Makerspaces are open-access workshops devoted to creative and technical work.
- Digital scanners allow capturing reality and transforming it into a 3D digital file.
- The 3D printers allow the creation of objects through the addition of diverse material.
- Students value positively the Makerspace-environment towards the development of creativity.

Engineers need creativity to achieve different solutions to the same problem. Creative competence has become a cross competence in engineering studies. In this research an educational activity with 44 engineering students from La Laguna University is designed for stimulating creative competence. The emergence of new teaching-learning environments, in which digital fabrication techniques are used to turn ideas into digital designs, and these into tangible products through 3D printing offer an opportunity for the development of creativity. The Abreaction Test of Creativity is used to measure the creativity value at the beginning and the end of the experiment, and a survey is conducted to know the students' perception of the influence in the development of their creativity. The results show that activities with digital editing tools and three-dimensional printing are valid for the development of creative competence: participants who performed the activity improved their creativity ability in 24,04 points. The perception of students about the impact of these activities on their creativity is high, with values above 3.5 out of 5.