What Is the Engineering Design Process & How to Teach It

For students, engineering knowledge can provide both a deeper understanding of the world and an introduction to a potential STEM career pathway. As a result, engineering design and the engineering design process have become essential topics for STEM teachers wanting to inform students about how engineers tackle problems and produce solutions in their daily work.

Teaching the design process in a way that’s inspiring, engaging and encouraging to students can be a challenge. This is how educators typically break down the engineering design process to inspire future engineers.

What Is the Engineering Design Process?

Defined as broadly, the engineering design process is the steps that engineers follow to find the solution to a particular problem. 

Essential steps may include preplanning that allows the engineer to determine objectives and potential challenges, prototyping, testing and design evaluation. 

The STEM design process isn’t always perfectly linear. An engineer may have to move back and forth between prototyping and testing, for example, before they arrive at a solution that works. 

As with most fields, iteration is expected, setbacks are common and success may require a process that is exploratory, rather than a straight path from problem to solution.

Why Are Teachers Focusing on the Engineering Design Process?

Engineering is increasingly important to STEM students, both as an example of a real-world application of STEM knowledge and as an introduction to STEM skills they may use as student engineers. 

There’s also some evidence that teaching the process can improve educational outcomes. The engineering design process may help engage students, improve student comprehension of written materials and improve retention of knowledge.

Teaching the process is also becoming an important part of some educational standards. For example, one of the primary current goals of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) is to integrate the process into STEM education. 

As a result, teaching the engineering design process may help organizations meet a variety of educational goals, like promoting STEM education or promoting diversity in STEM. 

How Teachers Break Down the Design Process

While the process can vary significantly depending on the engineer’s particular field and the problem they’re trying to solve, educators have a few ways of roughly outlining the design process. Most follow a structure like this one.

Define the Problem

What are the students trying to solve? Is it a global problem or something more local? Young engineers should think about the issue from multiple perspectives. They can talk to people from various backgrounds to hear different points of view.

How would solving this problem improve people’s lives? Who are they designing this product for? They should have a target audience in mind. 

For example, Doctor Bernard Fantus saw that many people were in need of blood transfusions during World War II. He realized that by storing blood in the same way that hospitals stored medicine, doctors could quickly and easily give people transfusions, which could save countless lives. To solve this problem, he invented the blood bank in 1937. 

Explore Solutions to Problems and Their Constraints

How can students invent a new product? Is there anything working for or against them?

One inspiring story that illustrates the concept of constraints and resources is that of inventor Doctor Patricia Bath. Growing up in Harlem, New York, money was tight for Patricia. However, her parents worked hard to instill in her the values of self-reliance and a lifelong desire to learn. 

Her mother scrubbed floors so Patricia could go to medical school. Patricia would go on to become a surgeon and invent a type of laser eye surgery that cures blindness caused by cataracts.

Students can read stories like this to identify their own constraints and resources when brainstorming ideas for a new product before creating a solution to test.

Optimize Your Solution Through Research

The next step is to come up with a list of questions and start answering them through research. Do any other inventions already exist to solve this problem? Which ones work well, and which ones don’t?

Students can use books, the Internet and people to do research on how long this problem has been around, who it affects and what special considerations need to be made to solve it.

Before inventing the lightning rod, Benjamin Franklin did numerous experiments to research electricity. He didn’t have any previous data to rely on because nobody knew that lightning was electrical in nature.

He gathered enough information from his experiments that he was able to come up with a concept for a metal rod, which could be used to prevent buildings from catching fire during a storm.

Thankfully, modern students are fortunate to have access to a wealth of knowledge to draw from. In this phase, STEM students should be encouraged to think of as many answers to what will solve the problem as possible. Creativity is key. Students will come up with several ideas that ultimately won’t work, but by brainstorming dozens of ideas, they can narrow down a solution. 

At first, there might be many solutions that appear to work. Eventually, they can focus on one of them to hone in on the goal of the design. Once they’ve compiled enough research, they can move on to the next step.

Communicate Your Solution With a Prototype

The next step of the STEM design process is to design the product. Students can draw it, make a 3D model of it by hand or on the computer, make diagrams, and create animations to show how it will work. They should list the materials they’ll need to bring the design to life.

This stage determines what the product will look like, if it has multiple parts, how the parts will work together and how big it will be. Students can design the product so that it’s ergonomic, inexpensive to build or fits inside a currently existing machine, for example.

A simple model that lets engineers test their design, the prototype might not be made of the same materials or even be the same size as the real thing. However, it can give people an idea of how well the product is going to work. It should be inexpensive to produce.

When Lonnie Johnson was working on a heat pump at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he took it home to keep tinkering with it. After hooking it up to the bathroom sink, he accidentally shot a stream of water across the room. This would become the prototype for the first toy water gun. 

Although most students will create their prototypes deliberately, educators should encourage them to think outside the box. After all, accidents have led to some of the greatest inventions.

The Importance of Real-World Applicability and Testing

Each of these phases provides an opportunity to teach different engineering challenges and possible solutions. Centering lessons or units around each step in the process provides teachers with a way to structure an individual lesson, unit or course.

There is a lot of versatility in how to teach the engineering design process, so long as the main principles are the foundation. Some engineering methods include a step before defining the problem. Design thinking, for example, often begins with empathizing — seeing from another’s point of view to identify a problem. This makes the design as intentional and practical as possible, making the solution, oftentimes, some kind of real-world object.

However, teachers may also experiment with other testable solutions, like a program or app. Other outlines may add additional steps, breaking down the optimization process into testing and improving steps, for example. This is where students would discover if the product works. It probably won’t do what students want it to on the first try or even the second. Many engineers spend considerable time in this phase of the engineering design process, tweaking the product and testing it repeatedly.

Students should ask what worked well, what didn’t and how could the design improve even more. Right away, problems with the design usually become apparent. New problems that students hadn’t even considered might crop up and prompt a search for solutions. Educators should encourage students to stay in the testing stage for quite some time, creating several iterations of their product.

Ralph Baer, for example, stayed in the testing stage for years to invent the first video game console. He created one prototype after another, going back to the drawing board several times and getting his product closer and closer to what he had in mind — a console that would give users an interactive TV experience. The final prototype, the Brown Box, became the Magnavox Odyssey game console in 1972.

Finally, engineering students should record the results of their projects, regardless of the engineering design process they used to get there. Did the product solve the original problem? They can demonstrate their results via a display board, presentation, a written report or a combination of methods. It’s important for students to document their results thoroughly so people can potentially manufacture their product in the future. 

How to Teach the Engineering Design Process

Educators have used a wide variety of strategies and lesson plans to explain this design process to students. There are also books available for teenagers and children to introduce them to engineering. These resources provide an opportunity to discuss related STEM and science communications topics.

The Design Exploration or Design Challenge Method 

One common teaching approach is the design challenge. Teachers present their class with a challenge or problem, then guide them through the engineering design process, helping them engineer their own solution to the problem.

To begin, the educator will establish criteria and constraints for the challenge. The educator will describe what the project must do and the limitations of the project. These limitations may be that students can only use provided materials. For conceptual projects, an educator may provide a list of acceptable materials or a design budget, instead.

Then, students will move on to developing, testing and iterating potential solutions. For example, students may design a device that protects an egg dropped from a certain height. Using simple materials and basic physics knowledge, students will create prototype containers and experiment until they design an effective solution. 

Real-world examples of the design process may help students approach their own projects. Educators may want to use examples like BattleBots, a television show where engineers apply their knowledge to design fighting robots.

In basic courses, educators may also want to ask some foundational questions about engineering, like “What is engineering?” or “Who is an engineer?” during the design process. Educators in more advanced courses may try to incorporate different topics, like the different types of engineering or potential career paths for students interested in the field.

Reverse-Engineering to Teach the Design Process

In other cases, it may be more effective to have students reverse-engineer an existing solution or product. With this approach, educators provide students with the answer to the problem. Students then analyze the answer, identifying how it solves the problem and potentially how an engineer could improve the solution.

For example, an educator may ask students to analyze a physical product like a pair of crutches. Given the product or an image of the product, students would begin by identifying what the product does and the problem it solves. In this case, the crutches help people get around when they’ve injured a foot or leg.

Next, they’ll identify why the solution works or how it solves this problem. Crutches provide support to a walker with a metal frame. The metal frame uses rubber or plastic to both provide cushioning at the top of the crutch and cover the metal where the crutch meets the ground. The crutch must be lightweight and ergonomic.

Ideally, students will be able to identify the minimum viable product for a pair of crutches — a product with just the features it needs to solve the problem.

Important Considerations When Reverse-Engineering

Students may be asked to consider both conceptual and physical requirements. Physical requirements are real-world constraints on weight, dimension and structure — crutches are light but strong enough to support a walker. 

Conceptual constraints are not related to the physical nature of the object — crutches must be affordable, made with obtainable materials and easily mass-produced.

Educators may also ask students to identify products that fill similar niches. One class, for example, may compare and contrast the design and functionality of a wheelchair with crutches. What does a wheelchair do that a pair of crutches can’t? How is a wheelchair designed differently to solve different but related problems?

By the end of the lesson, students should be able to communicate the function of the product they’ve studied, and how each design element works to solve a particular problem. They should be able to apply this mode of thinking to other products as well.

This process can be more straightforward than the more conventional design challenge approach to teaching the engineering design process. The solution already exists, meaning that students are faced with fewer open-ended questions about how a problem might be solved. This means the approach can lend itself to quicker lessons with less room for students to get stuck or confused.

In combination with the design exploration teaching strategy outlined above, this approach can be a great way to teach students about applying their knowledge of the engineering design process to real-world products they encounter.

Inspiring the Next Generation of Engineers

The engineering design process can serve as an excellent introduction to engineering topics. Teaching strategies for the process usually involve hands-on learning, like design challenge projects. 

These projects help educators walk students through the different phases of the design process. They also allow educators to show students how iteration and failure are both parts of being an engineer.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on October 28, 2021, and updated on January 30, 2026.