2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
GIFTS: Designing Five OER Lessons for Integrating Design Thinking into Introductory Engineering Design Courses
Presented at First-Year Programs Division (FPD) GIFTS Session 1: Human-Centered and Project-Based Innovation in First-Year Engineering Design
PURPOSE AND AUDIENCE
The purpose of this GIFT paper is to share six adaptable lesson plans that introduce key learning objectives from design thinking in the context of engineering design for undergraduates in a first-year engineering design course. The published materials for the six lessons are intended to help faculty who wish to ground engineering design pedagogy in the skillsets and sensibilities of design thinking. These six lessons will be published as free open educational resources (with CC BY 4.0 creative commons licenses); they can be used as a cohesive sequence, or any one lesson can be adapted and used independently. Each lesson’s materials are designed for a 60-minute class, but they can each be amended to fit each instructor and course’s needs.
BACKGROUND
Design Thinking (DT) is now a transdisciplinary field that has diverged in important ways from its origins in, among other disciplines, engineering design (ED) in the late 20th century (Auernhammer & Roth, 2023). Crucially, most DT practitioners today have adapted: ethnographic methods to understand stakeholder needs and anticipate unintended consequences of technologies; discoveries in the brain sciences to enhance creativity and team effectiveness; and techniques from across design disciplines to navigate ambiguity and complexity. Many engineering programs are using DT methods in their ED courses, but these efforts tend to be ad hoc, depending on each instructor’s previous exposure to DT. By designing a set of initial materials (including instructor guides, editable sample slide decks, editable student worksheets, and videos of us facilitating each lesson plan) it is the authors’ hope that engineering instructors from several institutions will be able to introduce DT in their introductory ED courses at a higher starting level.
FUNDING AND PUBLICATION
This project was funded by the Open Educational Initiative at the [REDACTED] Library–a member of OER Commons. All materials will be published as open educational resources with a creative commons license, freely available for any instructor to download and adapt, with proper citation of original authorship.
REFERENCES IN ABSTRACT
Auernhammer, J., & Roth, B. (2023). What Is Design Thinking? Understanding Innovation, 169–196.
