A TRIZ Tool for Engineering Education

A TRIZ design tool is developed to enhance the quality of student design projects and to attract students’ interest in the aerospace engineering program. TRIZ is the acronym for the phrase "Theory of Inventive Problem Solving" in Russian. The TRIZ design tool contains the contradiction matrix and inventive principles with extensive examples of aerospace innovations. The TRIZ inventive principles are abstract in description in order to fit in a wide variety of disciplines. The vague description becomes an obstacle to understand these principles. The design tool developed contains many engineering examples to help students learn these principles and apply them effectively. The tool is developed with Visual Basic to interface with the contradiction matrix stored in an Excel file. The matrix resolves contradictions of 39 parameters to selective inventive principles. Each inventive principle in the tool developed is on a web page containing text, pictures, and web links, with examples collected from literatures and internet resources. In addition, many case studies have been generated to walk through examples of using the matrix of contradiction and inventive principles.