A New Course on Creativity in an Engineering Program: Foundations and Issues

The importance of innovation in the world's economy, now undeniable, draws great attention to the need to improve organizations' creative potential. In the last 60 years, hundreds of books have been written on the subject and hundreds of webpages display information on how to be more creative and achieve innovation. Several North American and European universities offer graduated programs in creativity. However, building an effective and validated creativity training program is not without challenges. Because of the nature of their work, engineers are often asked to be innovative. Without aiming for a degree in creativity, could future engineers benefit from training programs in creativity? This article presents the conceptual framework and pedagogical elements of a new course in creativity for engineering students.Comment: 10 pages, Intl Conf on Innovative Design and Manufacturing (pp. 270-275). Aug 13-15, Montreal. IEEE Conference Proceeding

Creativity Training for Future Engineers: Preliminary Results from an Educative Experience

Due in part to the increased pace of cultural and environmental change, as well as increased competition due to globalization, innovation is become one of the primary concerns of the 21st century. We present an academic course designed to develop cognitive abilities related to creativity within an engineering education context, based on a conceptual framework rooted in cognitive sciences. The course was held at \'Ecole Polytechnique de Montr\'eal (\'EPM), a world renowned engineering school and a pillar in Canada's engineering community. The course was offered twice in the 2014-2015 academic year and more than 30 students from the graduate and undergraduate programs participated. The course incorporated ten pedagogical strategies, including serious games, an observation book, individual and group projects, etc., that were expected to facilitate the development of cognitive abilities related to creativity such as encoding, and associative analytical thinking. The CEDA (Creative Engineering Design Assessment) test was used to measure the students' creativity at the beginning and at the end of the course. Field notes were taken after each of the 15 three-hour sessions to qualitatively document the educative intervention along the semester and students gave anonymous written feedback after completing the last session. Quantitative and qualitative results suggest that an increase in creativity is possible to obtain with a course designed to development cognitive abilities related to creativity. Also, students appreciated the course, found it relevant, and made important, meaningful learnings regarding the creative process, its cognitive mechanism and the approaches available to increase it.Comment: 10 page

Convex Tours of Bounded Curvature

We consider the motion planning problem for a point constrained to move along a smooth closed convex path of bounded curvature. The workspace of the moving point is bounded by a convex polygon with m vertices, containing an obstacle in a form of a simple polygon with $n$ vertices. We present an O(m+n) time algorithm finding the path, going around the obstacle, whose curvature is the smallest possible.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, abstract presented at European Symposium on Algorithms 199

Accurate measurement of Cn2 profile with Shack-Hartmann data

The precise reconstruction of the turbulent volume is a key point in the development of new-generation Adaptive Optics systems. We propose a new Cn2 profilometry method named CO-SLIDAR (COupled Slope and scIntillation Detection And Ranging), that uses correlations of slopes and scintillation indexes recorded on a Shack-Hartmann from two separated stars. CO-SLIDAR leads to an accurate Cn2 retrieval for both low and high altitude layers. Here, we present an end-to-end simulation of the Cn2 profile measurement. Two Shack-Hartmann geometries are considered. The detection noises are taken into account and a method to subtract the bias is proposed. Results are compared to Cn2 profiles obtained from correlations of slopes only or correlations of scintillation indexes only.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, SPIE Conference "Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation" 2012, Amsterdam, paper 8447-19

La querelle des redoublements : l'apport de l'économétrie

Il existe une économie politique du redoublement dont il faut essayer de mettre à jour quelques ressorts : le redoublement est une modalité particulière de la gestion du système éducatif qui présente des coûts et des bénéfices et dont l’efficacité est mise en question depuis de nombreuses années. Si la question du redoublement est aussi difficile à trancher, c’est d’une part qu’elle pose un véritable problème méthodologique et d’autre part que ses implications dépassent et de loin le strict cadre scolaire pour déborder sur le marché du travail

Nuclear magnetic resonance relaxation enhancements produced by paramagnetic solutes: Effects of rhombicity in the zero field splitting tensor with the S=2 spin system as an example

Effects due to the nonuniaxial part of the zero field splitting (ZFS) tensor on NMR relaxation enhancements produced by paramagnetic species in solution (the NMR PRE) has been studied theoretically and experimentally in the ZFS limit, i.e., in the limit where the ZFS energy is large compared to the Zeeman energy. In the ZFS limit, the precessional motion of the electron spin is quantized with respect to molecule‐fixed coordinate axes. The uniaxial part of the ZFS tensor induces precessional motion in the transverse (x,y) components of the electron spin vector S, and x,y anisotropy in the ZFS tensor (i.e., a nonzero ZFS parameter E) induces precessional motion in the z component of S. The NMR‐PRE phenomenon is particularly sensitive to the motion of Sz and hence also to ZFS anisotropy in the xy plane. Mathematical expressions have been derived which describe the motion of the spin vector evolving under the influence of a general rhombic ZFS Hamiltonian and the influence of this motion on the NMR PRE in the ZFS limit. It is shown that oscillations in Sz occur at the transition frequencies of the S spin system; the frequencies and amplitudes of the precessional components of Sz can be calculated by diagonalizing the general ZFS Hamiltonian. These motions and their consequences with respect to the behavior of the NMR PRE are described in detail for the S=2 spin system. A parametrization of NMR‐PRE data is proposed which gives a clear criterion for the conditions under which rhombic parts of the ZFS tensor significantly affect the relaxation enhancements produced by an S=2 spin system. This criterion is of considerable practical importance for the analysis of NMR‐PRE data, since it defines conditions under which data may be analyzed without the need for independent experimental information concerning the magnitude of the ZFS tensor.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/70531/2/JCPSA6-99-1-18-1.pd

Powered Wheelchair Platform for Assistive Technology Development

Literature shows that numerous wheelchair platforms, of various complexities, have been developed and evaluated for Assistive Technology purposes. However there has been little consideration to providing researchers with an embedded system which is fully compatible, and communicates seamlessly with current manufacturer's wheelchair systems. We present our powered wheelchair platform which allows researchers to mount various inertial and environment sensors, and run guidance and navigation algorithms which can modify the human desired joystick trajectory, so as to assist users with negotiating obstacles, and moving from room to room. We are also able to directly access other currently manufactured human input devices and integrate new and novel input devices into the powered wheelchair platform for clinical and research assessment