When are our science students really creative and what type of creativity should we teach?

Creativity is essential for the success of scientists and engineers. From the history of science, we know about highly creative answers proposed to very hard questions, such as Max Planck and the quantization of energy, Albert Einstein and relativity, or Edward Jenner and vaccines. As a result, there is a strong push to teach and train science students to be creative in their work (Hadzigeorgiou 2012). While creativity should indeed be encouraged in students, at the lower years of university study one needs to determine how to balance this creativity with a strong awareness of what is realizable in practice. Especially in today’s world that is immersed in high-technology news, a perception is propagated in the media that any technology is possible, as long as someone thinks about it. This has led to a number of highly-publicized projects that have completely ignored practical feasibility (Johnson 2015, Hamilton 2016). Students also need to learn in what aspects of a project they should strive for creative ideas, and when to use conventional solutions that have been agreed upon. For instance, most experiments involving electricity connect the ground to the negative circuit terminal. This is standard practice, although there are sometimes reasons to do the opposite. When is it worth ignoring this standard in the name of creativity? Discussions on creativity often consider topics such as design thinking, etc. The discussion proposed here is more general than the choice of a particular technique. We focus the discussion specifically on post-secondary education. This presentation aims to start a discussion on the types of creativity we need to teach, to ensure that students will produce truly creative solutions, which will also yield good results when translated into practice. Because no “hard data” is available on the topic, a goal of the discussion would be to find possible ways to test various ways to teach this topic. Hadzigeorgiou, Y. et al (2012), Thinking about creativity in science education, Creative Education, 3(5), 603-611. Hamilton, T. (2016), Can this device actually tell you what is in your food?, The Globe and Mail, May 27, 2016. Johnson, C.Y. (2015), The wildly hyped $9 billion blood test company that no one really understands, The Washington Post, Oct. 15, 201