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Engineering is fundamentally about design, yet many undergraduate programs offer limited opportunities for students to learn to design. This design case reports on a grant-funded effort to revolutionize how chemical engineering is taught. Prior to this effort, our chemical engineering program was like many, offering core courses primarily taught through lectures and problem sets. While some faculty referenced examples, students had few opportunities to construct and apply what they were learning. Spearheaded by a team that included the department chair, a learning scientist, a teaching-intensive faculty member, and faculty heavily engaged with the undergraduate program, we developed and implemented design challenges in core chemical engineering courses. We began by co-designing with students and faculty, initially focusing on the first two chemical engineering courses students take. We then developed templates and strategies that supported other faculty-student teams to expand the approach into more courses. Across seven years of data collection and iterative refinements, we developed a framework that offers guidance as we continue to support new faculty in threading design challenges through core content-focused courses. We share insights from our process that supported us in navigating through challenging questions and concerns. 

STEM instruction commonly constrains learners’ agency as a means to focus attention to specific content. One consequence of this is much more research has investigated problem solving, rather than problem framing. This study investigated how learners negotiate framing agency—that is, making decisions about how to frame a design problem. Set in the context of a coding camp, learners worked with micro:bits and paper template my:Talkies to pose a community problem that could be solved via radio systems. Noticing their fixation, we guided learners through an ideation technique that prompts them to generate humiliating, harmful ideas before generating beneficial ideas, which resulted in divergent designs. Interaction and discourse analysis of video recordings highlights how learners (re)framed.