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he toughest problems facing our society—how to provide all our citizens with adequate and affordable food, housing, and medical care, efficient and economical public transportation, clean and safe energy—are not likely to be solved by easy or conventional means. If they could be, they would have been solved by now. To the extent that the problems are technological, creative engineers are needed to solve them. We—engineering professors—are in the business of producing engineers. It would seem our responsibility, and also in our best interest, to produce some creative ones—or least not to extinguish the sparks of creativity our students bring with them. We are not doing too well at this, however. Despite all that has been written and said about problem solv ing and critical thinking, most engineering schools are still going about business as usual, relying on the traditional lecture-homework-quiz format of well defined problems and single correct answers. Unfortunately, while efficient, this format has never been shown to be effective at producing the critical, innovative thinking skills needed to solve difficult technological problems. Nonetheless, as the pressure mounts to cram more and more information into each course, we find it increasingly hard to do anything but cover the syllabus. With the university reward system tilted overwhelming toward research, there are no incentives other than personal satisfaction for developing and testing new teaching methods.” So we continue to cover the syllabus, pretending that what we teach is the same as what our students learn.