Integrating design heuristics into your classroom

While successful concept generation is essential for innovative solutions, engineering students often receive limited instruction about how to accomplish it. Design Heuristics have been shown to facilitate concept generation by guiding students to explore multiple concepts in the solution space. In this study, we investigated how four instructors integrated Design Heuristics into their own engineering design courses. We conducted interviews with instructors about their preparations, approaches, and classroom experiences while integrating the Design Heuristics pedagogy into their courses for the first time. The findings revealed that both novice and experienced instructors reported few challenges in lesson preparation and implementation, and positive impacts on students' idea generation outcomes. These experiences offer guidelines to support other instructors in their adoption of the Design Heuristics tool for student idea generation.