Abstract In this paper, we report on an investigation of what students need to learn in the first year in various discipline-based subjects to launch then on their way to meet specified discipline threshold learning outcomes (TLOs) by the time they graduate. We frame our investigation using both the threshold concepts that the students must master in first year in order to succeed in learning in the discipline and also the threshold learning outcomes that they need to achieve by third year. We describe and analyse workshops used to engage lecturers with the challenges of designing first year curriculum in their r discipline, suggest why threshold concepts are useful in focusing both lecturers and students on what is essential, and outline briefly some of the creative solutions the lecturers offered
