Lateral Thinking through Black Box Experiment among Engineering Students

Lateral thinking is important in generating high quality human resources. More competitive, more creative and innovative thinking are vital in getting the best outcome from a person. Hence, the university has emphasized the importance of the lateral thinking through teaching and learning in order to produce marketable and high quality graduates. Open-ended question made of non-structured question where the answer depends on the student's best creativity in solving a given situation. They have to initiate efforts and ways to get acceptable, consistent and accurate answer in answering the situation. This open-ended question is the essence of this study to gauge students' achievement, ability and test their level of innovation. This paper reports an experimental entitled black box for Electrical & Electronic Lab II (KL2082) at the Department of Electrical, Electronic and Systems Engineering (EESE), Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment. The results showed 56 out of 58 students (96.5%) in the class have reached the minimum limit which set at 40% on the results with mean 55.26 and standard deviation of 15.44 obtained through the results. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer reviewed under responsibility of the UKM Teaching and Learning Congress 2011