lunch&LEARN: Beyond code: what co-design teaches us on creativity, teamwork, and critical thinking

The main challenge of digital design courses is to balance tool-centric and concept-centric teaching within a landscape of rapid technological change. What happens when you raise the abstraction level in a highly technical digital design course?

In their course, Miguel Peon Quiros, Denisa Constantinescu, Ruben Rodriguez Alvarez and Stasa Kostic leverage hardware–software co-design to foster creativity and critical thinking. Their intention is that students spend most of their time wrestling with real-world open-ended problems with meaning beyond the classroom. Overall, their aim is to cultivate non-technical skills — teamwork, time management, and decision-making — to complement engineering expertise. To this end, they applied the concepts from the Science and Engineering Teaching and Learning course.

In this talk, Miguel Peon Quiros, Denisa Constantinescu, Ruben Rodriguez Alvarez and Stasa Kostic will reflect on their teaching journey, explaining how students dealt with harder problems and more freedom — and what new teaching challenges they faced. They will share what they observed, what they tried, and whether these approaches had the intended effects on student learning. They’ll close with examples of student projects and invite discussion on how to better embed soft skills into technical courses.