LESSONS LEARNED FROM TEACHING AND TUTORING DESIGN THINKING TO ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING STUDENTS

To deal with societal challenges, future engineers need new skills and competences. Design thinking is one such skill. The project Future Technology Studies (Dahle Øien, 2021) aimed to develop the study programs in technology at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) according to future technological development, societal challenges, and industry needs. One of the findings from FTS was that technology students should learn Design Thinking. In this work, we study an implementation of design thinking in an electronic engineering study program. Specifically, we use three perspectives, students, learning assistants, and teachers, to study how they experience the introduction of a cross-disciplinary topic in a domain-specific project course. The target group were electrical engineering students (N=117) who did a user-centered electronic system in a project-based introductory course in electronic systems design. Drawing on findings from a web-based questionnaire from students (N=67) and interviews with course staff members and tutors (N=13) our findings show (1) that more work is needed to improve the course description, activities, syllabus, and student evaluation and (2) the importance of making the purpose and goal of including design thinking in the course clear for the students.