The road to interactive patent searching at an American University in the UAE

The Engineering division at New York University in Abu Dhabi encourages students to not be afraid of thinking differently when faced with a challenge. Accordingly, a key aspect of the engineering curriculum focuses on invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship (i2e) through all years of undergraduate study[1]. Through i2e students are encouraged to hone their creativity and develop their leadership skills, so that by the time the students graduate they are empowered to become productive and innovative contributors to the engineering profession. One of the engineering students' first exposures to i2e is through the course, Design and Innovation, required of all first-year students intending to major in any Engineering discipline. By the end of this intensive three-week course, students will create a prototype to a unique invention that addresses a theme in the class. As the Science and Engineering librarian, the author strives to point students to the right information sources and to teach them how to use these. In the Design and Innovation course, the librarian teaches the students how to search the literature to determine if their invention is truly unique or if someone else has already thought of it. Although by the time the students are enrolled in Design and Innovation, they are exposed to how to search the journal literature, searching to determine if an invention exists via the USPTO database requires using a skill set that is different from searching for journal articles. Based on the author's observations, university age students retain more information when they are involved in the learning process. Studies have shown that students of Generation Y, or the Millennial Generation, are visual learners that will be more likely to internalize what they learn if they are exposed to interactive activities[2, 3]. Therefore, the goal is to continually develop an experiential patent searching module that will greater ensure that the engineering students at NYUAD have an excellent basis to search for inventions for Design and Innovation and beyond.