Cultivating design-thinking in Freshmen: The evolution of the KU Freshman design course

Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research (KU) is a recent start-up university in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with a mission focus on excellence in undergraduate engineering education. Through its leadership´s vision and strategic partnerships, with institutions like Georgia Institute of Technology in the US and KAIST in South Korea, KU has embarked on a challenging experiment to internationalize and vertically integrate inquiry-based design pedagogy into all of its undergraduate degree programs in the College of Engineering. The first step in the integration has been the creation of a college-wide, “cornerstone” freshman engineering design experience that meets the needs and context of KU´s diverse international student body and that uses effective pedagogical alternatives to lecture-based instruction. In this paper, we describe the research-driven evolution of the freshman design experience at KU from a discipline-specific offering within the Departments of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, to an inter-disciplinary, College-wide Freshman Engineering Design Course (FEDC).