Lessons Learned From Teaching System Thinking To Engineering Students

Abstract

There are frequent calls for engineers to build integrated approaches to complex social and environmental problems. However, engineering education provides little opportunity to explore these "wicked problems". Given the complexity of the challenges, engineers face upon graduation, introducing students to systems thinking approaches and wicked problems could greatly benefit their ability to deal with complex challenges in the real world. At the University of Toronto, we have been taking part in the initiative to design a course with the primary topic of Systems Thinking targeted towards upper-year students from all disciplines. The objective of this course is not for student teams to get to a solution, but more so to develop an understanding of the wicked problem they are working on while educating them to leverage system thinking tools for visualizing their problem space and system mapping techniques to look at open systems.  This presentation will share our observations of the interactions, lessons learned, and challenges we faced during our first iteration of this course. The objective of this paper is to start an ongoing thread about the progress of teaching systems thinking concepts to engineering students throughout the upcoming years, along with the learning outcomes established from this course. In the future, we want to extract the data gathered from this course and research systems thinking principles and their benefits in approaching wicked problems.