'Komputer & Creativität' Teaching at the Intersection of Engineering, AI, and Theater

Stefan Röhrl, Sabrina Schwarzmeier, David Elias Fresacher, Luca Sacchetto, Alexandra Strasser, Klaus Diepold

Abstract: Industry demands for engineers emphasize communication and creativity. However, traditional methods of teaching interdisciplinary competencies as mere add-ons have proven insufficient. This paper explores a novel approach to teaching communication skills and fostering creativity in engineering students through a course called 'Komputer & Creativität’ (sic) that combines technical content with improvisational theater workshops. The workshops provide experiential learning opportunities and focus on aspects such as structuring and improvisation’ role dynamics, and storytelling. Evaluation results indicate significant improvements in participants' self-perceived communication skills, as well as high student satisfaction with the course format. The results suggest that the promotion of both content-specific and interdisciplinary skills through a course using improvisational theater can be successful and may also be transferable to other courses.

External IDs:dblp:conf/gecon2/RohrlSFSSD24