An Emergent Approach to Design Thinking and Collaborative Team Composition in an Introduction to Engineering Course

Traditional approaches to design thinking in introductory engineering courses often prescribe the challenge problem, target users, and/or composition of the student design team itself. Inspired by the more fluid conceptualization of collaborative teamwork found in the OpenIDEO platform, as well as the emphasis on emergent teams and problems whose members take collective cognitive responsibility for idea improvement that is the hallmark of Knowledge Building pedagogy, we asked, how might we re-imagine the introduction to engineering experience to emphasize more emergent and collective problem definition, team composition, and individual and collective agency? The aim of this paper will be to share the process and results of this re-design in its first iteration, and place it within the context of the learning sciences.