This article describes a teaching module designed to enhance engineering creativity in an introductory chemical engineering course. The module includes an exercise to design column packing material, and an open-ended research project to describe the societal impact of chemical engineering. These assignments were created to illustrate the benefit of generating many ideas independent of analysis. The results of two years of survey-based assessment showed that these techniques improved students' confidence and ability with creative problems. (Contains 5 figures and 3 tables.)