(429v) Promoting Systems Thinking for Holistic Undergraduate Engineering Education

Practitioners in many disciplines, including Engineering, are being increasingly called upon to use systems approach to address challenging problems related to sustainability. The systems approach transcends disciplines and is especially required when answers to inherently complex issues are sought. It has been suggested that handling complexity requires working in an intuitive domain not considered in engineering education. The need to improve studentï¾?s ability to understand complex systems necessitates improving their systems thinking skills. We will discuss about preparing undergraduate engineering students to handle challenging interdisciplinary problems and improve their systems thinking skills.