Reverse Engineering Pedagogy as an Educational Tool to Promote Symbiosis between Design and Physics

In this work, we introduce our reverse engineering pedagogy (REP), which aims to serve as a means for symbiosis of design thinking and physics. The objective of the approach is to create an enabler for engineering students to approach their design problems through the lens provided by first-principle physics. We discuss our DA3D framework for the organization of such activities and describe how they may be incorporated in the classrooms. We also chronicle our implementation of the reverse engineering activities in our introductory undergraduate year 1 electromagnetism course, where two activities involving the dissection of aluminum electrolytic capacitor and induction cooker are introduced. The overall results show an increase in self-efficacy of the students on use of physics concepts in their design processes.