Integrating Design Thinking in Freshmen-Level Engineering Curriculum

This work presents embedding a design thinking teaching module within an existing engineering undergraduate lab course. The lab, which is freshmen level, gradually builds up critical skills beyond the common mathematical and analytical skills. Such skills are becoming mandatory by the fourth industrial revolution and jobs of future skillset. It gradually and solidly introduces design thinking concepts through a number of experiments where students are fully exposed to the stages of design thinking: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. Such skills are needed to address problems, common in modern technological advances, which are not well defined and require out of the box innovation. The lab, which was primarily offered online due the COVID-19 pandemic, was taken by more than 100 freshmen level students, required a final design project. The student learning outcomes were acquired and analyzed.