WIP Introducing design thinking in first-year engineering education

Abstract

Our initial Work in Progress student research suggests today's engineering student sometimes choose engineering as a profession that can make a difference in the world. They see it as providing them an education that will enable them to join a profession that has substantial social purpose which is congruent with their values and goals. This student aspiration conforms to one of the basic tenets of design thinking in that it is a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation with a human-centered design ethos. At our university we have started to infuse the concepts of design thinking in our initial Introduction to Engineering course and then later in our capstone senior design project courses. Between those course bookends we are working with our faculty to introduce to them the design thinking concept of identifying the need in place of only teaching transactional engineering concepts and theories and how to solve engineering problems. This paper will illustrate how we have introduced design thinking in our first-year introduction to engineering course and then conducted indirect assessment of our students' learning outcomes for the course for the purpose of continuous improvement. The indirect study results were obtained by an anonymous survey given to over several hundred freshman engineering students who are matriculating in a wide range of undergraduate engineering and engineering technology programs. One of our key findings was that about 82% of students agreed that Design Thinking was a valuable learning experience. Further, 93% of students agreed that having a basic understanding of Design Thinking will be of assistance to them as they pursue their engineering education. After being informed by students that one of the two design thinking projects had a relatively low value with regard to providing future assistance to them as they pursued their engineering education we substituted that project with a choice of 6 projects that we believe will be more favorably appreciated by the students. At the completion of the modified course we will survey the students again to see if there are further opportunities for continuous improvement of the course.