In Canadian engineering institutions, a significant design experience must occur in the final year of study. In the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems at the University of Windsor, unsolved, open ended projects sponsored by industrial partners from a variety of sectors are provided to the student teams in order for them to apply appropriate design principles to generate original, feasible, working design solutions. Students may be engaged in systems design, facilities layout, optimization or other discipline related projects. To facilitate their progress, a series of interactive workshops have been designed to expose the students to team work and people skills, time management challenges, and so forth. They were designed to be fun and to support the student project activities regardless of the project type and industry sector The course structure, an overview of the workshops, and a detailed description of the "problem definition" workshop is presented in this work. (Contains 6 tables and 7 figures.)