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Most engineering students are rarely assigned creative tasks to think abstractly around mathematical models, other than being asked to apply theory to real-world scenarios. Challenging the traditional pedagogy, students enrolled in inventory and supply chain system design and control, an upper-level industrial and systems engineering course, were asked to complete two poems throughout the semester-long course. The students were asked to construct poems around a concept, model, or topic covered in the course: the first poem was focused on deterministic inventory modeling and the second poem was focused on stochastic inventory modeling. At the end of the semester, students completed a lookback survey asking several open-ended questions detailing their experience and attitude towards these creative writing assignments. Data was collected during the semesters Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 and of the 84 total students over the two semesters, 64 consented to participate in the study. The student responses to reflection prompts and student-written poems were analyzed to understand how engineering students approached this creative writing assignment, what type of creative processes they utilized to complete these assignments, and how these assignments contributed to their learning. To this end, the student responses to reflection prompts were analyzed to identify the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations as well as to elicit the steps of their processes toward completing these assignments. A sample of of student-written poems were examined in detail to assess their technical accuracy as well. In this paper, we will present our findings on why students pick specific topics for their poems and how their reasons for choosing topics influence their effort in their writing as well as the technical accuracy of their poems. 

To enhance conceptual understanding of mathematical models for inventory management, we developed poetry-writing assignments for a required, upper-level undergraduate course in an industrial and systems engineering program. Specifically, two poetry-writing assignments were incorporated into an inventory and supply chain system design and control course. The first assignment, due one week before the first term exam, asked students to write a poem about a concept, model or topic related to deterministic inventory modeling. The second and assignment, due one week before the second term exam, asked the students to write a poem about a concept, model or topic related to stochastic inventory modeling. The students were also asked to respond to several open-ended questions on their approach to writing the poems and their assessment of the impact of these poetry writing on improving their conceptual understanding of the underlying mathematical models. Data was collected in Spring 2022 semester. The student written-poetry will be analyzed for correctness and to identify misunderstandings or gaps in understanding. In this paper, we will present our findings from the content analysis of student-written poetry and our preliminary findings on the effectiveness of poetry-writing assignments to enhance conceptual understanding of mathematical models for inventory management.