BEYOND HANDS-ON-LEARNING - FOSTERING CREATIVITY IN STUDENT COMPETITIVE TEAMS

Engineering educators and practitioners have suggested that collaborative-competitive team design events promote innovation. These competitions are popular, and they attract sponsors and participants. Beyond being popular, they are believed to provide rich learning opportunities for students. We are currently investigating combining student centered learning to have a more appropriate mix of theory and experience (hands-on activities) to provide a complete experiential learning environment to foster innovation and creativity. In this paper we investigate the theoretical models that can be used to model the Sooner Racing Team (SRT) of University of Oklahoma. Experiential Learning is the foundation to develop the competencies of students engaged in SRT. The SRT is setup as a learning organization and relies on peer-learning to facilitate developing innovation related meta-competencies.