Design at Scale in a First-Year Transdisciplinary Engineering Design Course

ABSTRACT

Many Canadian engineering faculties employ a first-year design course. Offering a large-scale, realistic and valuable design experience to students beginning to learn about engineering is challenging. In 2020 the Faculty of Engineering (University of Alberta) introduced a new first-year design course for 1200+ qualifying year students Introduction to Engineering Design, Communication, and Profession. The course is founded on four principles engineering design is a distinguishing and core feature of engineering practice and education, transdisciplinary engineering design has a common process, sustainability is a key societal goal and integral to engineering design, and the communication of the evaluated design proposition is a necessary step towards design implementation. The course objectives are to introduce first-year students to the transdisciplinary design process and demonstrate differences between the engineering and traditional science programs. The course design had four additional requirements (1) meet the needs of all our programs;(2) be taught by instructors from each of our disciplines (supporting transdisciplinarity and discipline ownership);(3) engage applied learning;(4) use the design process to solve a community-based problem. The course implementation was supported by two co-lead instructors, the continued involvement of a third design instructor (course co-creator), eight guest instructors (representing all Faculty programs and the provincial professional association), and ten teaching assistants from both engineering and industrial design programs. All course materials (lecture slides, online resources, project descriptions, assessments) were developed in advance. Even as we were implementing this new course, we were collecting midterm feedback, reflecting on and adjusting the course in real-time, and planning the next iteration using a continual improvement process. At the time of original submission, the aim of this paper was to provide insight into the course development, implementation and lessons learned through its delivery. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic, many more challenges faced the instructional team;these are also detailed in this paper.