Creative Dispositions: Teaching for Creativity in Engineering Education

In this article, we discuss the incorporation of a course entitled "Creative Sound Workshop" into the Acoustic Engineering undergraduate curriculum at the Universidad Austral de Chile. The course was aimed at offering an experience of applied musical creativity to engineering students. We provide a detailed account of the process of curriculum design, with reference to the current literature on creativity and, more specifically, creative thinking in education. We also introduce the notion of "thinking dispositions", in the light of which we discuss students' performance on their final project: the design of a semi-autonomous interactive digital instrument using Pure Data, an open-source visual programming environment. Finally, we reflect on our experience of two years of teaching the workshop, and discuss how the course has been received.