Creativity grows in importance, and it is considered one of the skills that an engineering curriculum should be instilled in future professionals. Creativity is crucial for engineering, given the growing scope of challenges and complexity, and the diversity of technologies. However, creativity has not been sufficiently included in the engineering curricula because it is considered innate to the area. Consequently, we observe barriers to creativity in engineering education like lack of or poor conceptualization of creativity by students, little attention to creativity by teachers, and 'insufficient time' for activities aimed to develop problem-solving and creativity skills. This work focuses on presenting how the creative process and research on creativity can be integrated into Project-Based Learning (PBL) approaches. Thus, this paper intends to relate the creative process, the five Ps model of creativity (Person, Process, Product, Press, and Phases), and the aligned model proposed by (Kolmos, de Graaff, & Du, 2009) that considers seven elements. For example, we observe a close relationship between the elements of the PBL alignment model and the creativity integration as explicitly part of a curriculum; the element progression, size and duration, and creative process; the element spaces and organization, and environments for encouraging creative thinking, only for citing some matches. Likewise, we observe an important link between creativity for problem-solving in a novel way and PBL as a learning approach for solving problems under the exemplarity principle. The analysis seeks to create a general framework to enhance the comprehension of creativity in engineering education when a PBL approach is considered. The goal is to show the distinctive characteristics of PBL that favour the encouragement of the creative process and how the PBL alignment model's elements correspond to crucial elements and factors of creativity.

Harmonizing Creative Process and PBL alignment: an understanding of fostering creativity in Engineering Education.