A first-year undergraduate course at Uppsala University has been redesigned in a process exploring different levels of student participation. In the first part of the project, the student voice was heard through interviews focusing on the role of the course in the degree program. In the second part, a student-teacher team was formed to develop course curriculum and teaching material in partnership. Among the implemented changes were new seminars focusing on conceptual understanding, redesign of all lectures to include active student participation, and a change of the course literature. The redesigned course significantly increased student satisfaction compared to previous years. Important success factors were involvement of the student organization to promote the project, institutional support, early selection of concrete development tasks, and allowing team members to choose what they wanted to develop according to their own expertise. Keywords Student engagement, Course curriculum, Student voice, Students as partners Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Cover Page FootnoteWe thank Maja Elmgren for continuous support and helpful comments on the manuscript, and Felix Ho for auditing a project meeting and gathering reflections from project members. We would also like to thank Johan Wickström, Ulrike Schnaas, Susanna Barrineau and Alexis Bergström for helpful discussions. Financial support was obtained from a TUFF pedagogical development grant from the Disciplinary Domain of Science and Technology, Uppsala University. A first-year undergraduate course at Uppsala University has been redesigned in a process exploring different levels of student participation. In the first part of the project, the student voice was heard through interviews focusing on the role of the course in the degree program. In the second part, a student-teacher team was formed to develop course curriculum and teaching material in partnership. Among the implemented changes were new seminars focusing on conceptual understanding, redesign of all lectures to include active student participation, and a change of the course literature. The redesigned course significantly increased student satisfaction compared to previous years. Important success factors were involvement of the student organization to promote the project, institutional support, early selection of concrete development tasks, and allowing team members to choose what they wanted to develop according to their own expertise.