Reimagining the First-Year Experience

Teaching the Future by Designing for It

Stephanie Brenton, UMSI Lecturer III,  shares how she designs courses that connect students with real-world challenges, encourage interdisciplinary thinking, and create meaningful, engaging classroom experiences.

Each year I update my courses with one goal in mind: to prepare students not just for academic success, but for the real challenges of working on cross-functional software and UX teams. That means teaching beyond the syllabus—focusing on how students give and receive feedback, handle ambiguity, and support their peers in high-stakes, collaborative work.

In team-based courses, I build in structured checkpoints to help students assess not just their projects, but their team cohesion—how they’re communicating, building trust, and resolving friction. Four times each semester, every team reflects on how they’re doing, how they can grow, and how they rate their performance across dimensions like trust, kindness, communication, and shared accountability. I return both their raw data and team averages, helping them identify disconnects, blind spots, and techniques to level up.

I frame these as coaching moments, not graded evaluations. I connect each team with tips, examples, and language that help them move through the phases of team development—from forming to storming to norming to performing. I also incorporate real-world insights about stakeholder alignment: how to partner with a product owner, anticipate a lead developer’s needs, or navigate an executive “swoop and poop.” The result is not just better project work, but students who are more prepared for the interpersonal dynamics of industry teams.

This summer, I’m also helping plan the new UMSI maker space in the Leinweber building—while designing SI 511: IoT Prototyping and Innovation, a Winter 2026 course that will welcome students from UX, archives, library science, data science, and agile development. A hands-on, maker-driven course, SI 511 invites students to build passion projects and custom form factors using sensors, 3D printing, sewing, and physical computing. It builds on my SI 612 class, which emphasizes seamless human-technology integration through advanced research methods. SI 511 skips the theory and dives right into innovation and experimentation, making technical skills more approachable through playful, tangible outcomes.

In SI 407 this fall, the first undergraduate course I’ll teach at UMSI, students will learn a foundational version of the discovery process used by UX teams in industry—designed to meet them where they are while introducing the structure and mindset of professional design work. Each phase of the dual-track agile process will offer a menu of research and design methods students can use to move their work forward. We’ll begin with an individual project to build personal fluency, then shift to team projects with more complexity and ambiguity. Along the way, students will learn how to collaborate across roles and plan design efforts in a way that mirrors modern agile environments.

To keep my teaching grounded in what students will face after graduation, I’m also surveying industry contacts this summer to stay aligned with current UX and software practices. I want students to graduate with relevant skills—and also the communication habits, strategic confidence, and collaborative mindset that make them standout team members and future leaders.