Through the elaborate design of PBL projects, first principles thinking was applied through the implementation of the projects. For the project 1, according to the pedagogy request at AAU, the group of students wrote a report together. In the final 118-page report, the students not only presented their concepts, principles, and knowledge, formulated with their own words which included the basics in reaction mechanisms of nucleophilic substitution, reaction kinetics, the driving forces behind molecular assembly, and the distinctions between equilibrium and non-equilibrium molecular assembly from a thermodynamic perspective. This indicated their active engagement in learning the fundamental 200 prinicples in chemistry. The successful building of the kinetic model also proved a solid understanding of the first principles in chemistry. An oral exam was subsequently conducted for this group, with 3 examiners including the supervisors over a span of 5 hours. The questions ranged from fundamental principles in general chemistry and physical chemistry to reaction mechanisms and the details of research methods and results in their report. All the questions were answered with a certain degree of 205 clarity and relevance although the answers are given by different students. One of the students could even identify what types of non-covalent interactions are involved in the formation of supramolecular structures. The students could also give reasonable explanations and judgments through reasoning from the fundamental principles. Their performances were graded respectively. Denmark's grading system is based on a scale that ranges from -3 to 12 to grade the performance from unacceptable to 210 excellent . Score 2 corresponds to a performance meeting only the minimum requirements for acceptance. In this study group, 3 students are scored 12, 2 students scored 10, and 2 students scored 7. Overall, their collective performance was above the average compared to all student groups in the fall semester. The report and the evalution indicated first principles thinking was effectively enabled in PBL to increase students' learning depth and their ability to solve problems. For the project 2, by reframing the the problem of synthesizing a target compound, the synthetic problem has been broken down to 3 sub-problems. Each student has finally worked out the sub-problems and taught with each other how the synthesis could be performed and what the reaction mechanisms and underpinned chemistry were.