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).