Design Thinking and Service-Learning for First-Year Engineering Students

摘要

Developing empathy and understanding the unique needs of stakeholders are highly important skills that engineering students should learn. Since such skills are closely tied to the success of service-learning engineering projects, teaching design thinking to students seems to be a natural fit. As such, a simple design thinking process was recently incorporated into service-learning first-year introductory engineering courses at a liberal arts private undergraduate institution. Using a mixed methods approach, this paper examines the impacts of design thinking on first-year engineering students and investigates students' confidence in technical and professional engineering design thinking skills and if students perceive that design thinking enhances their learning of engineering and design. Our findings indicate that students who participate in a service-learning, design thinking course felt more confident with technical engineering skills and felt they learned more about the iterative nature of the design process and prototype testing. This is especially true for women, who show the highest gains in self-reported confidence with constructing design prototypes.