Developing creativity and multidisciplinary approaches in teaching engineering problem-solving

Engineering education is in need of innovative teaching and learning methods to improve the ability of our graduates to solve complex problems and to make explicit the connections between engineering and community or society. Multidisciplinary approaches can provide the synergy and spark the creativity required to develop workable solutions to the increasingly complex problems of today's society. The purpose of this paper is to detail some of the innovative teaching and learning methods in agricultural and biological engineering (ABE) that address these issues, including multidisciplinary problem-solving and tools for developing creativity.