Designing for ‘Seeing Across Projects’ Based Learning

Abstract

Design thinking is an important skill in engineering practice, but it is difficult to teach and learn. The primary means of teaching design is by engaging students in project-based design experiences. In addition to supporting students in having design experiences, there is a need to help students get more out of the design experience they are already having. This gap presents a design research opportunity for which there are many directions to explore. The variation theory of learning posits that people learn through exposure to certain patterns of variance and invariance across instances of a concept. However, there are few systematic curricular efforts to help students learn by seeing across collections of personal or community design experiences. This work explores the design research problem and opportunity of “how might we design environments that support learning from seeing across individual design experiences?” A three-phase design research approach was used. First, the iterative design of several learning environments and activities over four years was framed as a series of research through design (RtD) inquiries that all addressed the same broad design research question. This resulted in over fifty learning activities (RtD artifacts) named ‘seeing across projects (SAP)’ activities. Second, these artifacts were synthesized using the annotated portfolio methodology. Two Annotated portfolios were created, the first focused on breadth, and the second focused on depth. Variation theory was used as an analytical lens to provide insights on what was made possible to learn in the enacted learning environment annotations. These two portfolios resulted in a model that describes the five key elements of the analyzed SAP activities. This also resulted in the identification of three key properties of SAP activities (content, source, and selection), their values, and some potential implications they have for learning and the feasibility of implementation. Finally, the model resulting from the annotated portfolio was aligned with the key principles of the variation theory of learning to create a framework for designing SAP activities grounded in a learning theory. Overall, the results of this work are the proposal and initial investigation of a new, but complementary, pedagogical direction for engineering design education called ‘seeing across projects’ based learning.