Scaffolding of a 'create-first' pedagogy with modeling and simulation at one of the UK's oldest universities

King's College London relaunched it's Engineering department in 2019 with the aim of attracting students and staff to tackle new societal and technological challenges and change the world through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary education. In this talk I will describe our journey towards a ‘create-first' programme pedagogy flipping the traditional Blooms triangle to deliver a horizontally and vertically integrated curriculum with design and make at the heart. We will reflect on the emerging benefits of scaffolding project-based learning with design and simulation and highlight the improved design, sustainability, and systems thinking skills seen in our students. Our deep-dive will focus on a first-year integrated design course where students work in teams to design, make, and operate a remote-control ship to collect floating waste in a water tank. Our project-based approach exposes students to a range of manufacturing methods. We have created a series of short workshops for 2D cutting, 3D printing, and three-axis milling and we will demonstrate how instructors can use the Fusion 360 API to automate the modelling of engineering components. In this project-based learning module 200+ students use Fusion 360 (and connections with Simulink and Arduino) to develop high fidelity digital twins of a design, build, and test project, while retaining the open-ended nature of design projects and maintaining a common digital thread throughout the experience.