Teaching thinking and problems solving at University: A course on TRIZ

Thinking and problem solving skills are considered to be of significant importance in many professions. Surveys indicate that university education fails in appropriately enhancing these skills. This paper presents a concept of teaching thinking and problem solving as a separate course, based on the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ). Student surveys showed that students' perception of their abilities in problem solving changed vastly as a consequence of the course. Students reflected that they would never have expected themselves to come up with the ideas they eventually thought of and suggested while conducting their final project, had they not been formally taught about the tools of problem solving. It was also found that this course on TRIZ thinking tools impacted students' problem solving abilities much more than discipline-based courses, supporting the superiority of the `enrichment' over the 'infusion' approach