spirit, we contend that in design, build, and test courses studentslearn when they are required to reflect on their experiences and identify theirlearning explicitly. Further, we posit that utilization of an assessment instrument,the learning statement (LS), can be used to both enable and assess studentlearning. In our course, AME4163: Principles of Engineering Design, a senior-level,pre-capstone, engineering design course, students learn by reflecting on doing bywriting statements anchored in Kolb’s experiential learning cycle. In Fall 2016we collected over 11,000 learning statements from over 150 students. To addressthe challenge of analyzing and gleaning knowledge from the large number oflearning statements we resorted to text mining
epistemology, teamwork and equity). While seminar goals aligned with the goals ofLA programs nationally, our seminar design team also articulated several values which guidedthe design of our seminar: a) helping LAs reframe their role as supporting growth rather thanevaluation, b) valuing a broad set of metrics of success from day one, c) celebrating that differentstudents bring in different expertise, and disrupting overly simplistic expertise/novicedichotomies, d) acknowledging that we all have different starting points and valuing a pluralityof goals, e) helping our students track their own progress through reflecting on concreterepresentations of their thinking, and f) supporting LAs in developing deep disciplinaryknowledge of design thinking. This
abilityto transfer the closed-ended skills used on a typical math problem to an open-ended problem.The Reflective Practitioner. A study by Valkenberg and Dorst discussed the use of descriptive andreflective practices in design [6]. This paper drew heavily on Schön’s paradigm of reflective practice [7].Schön contends that every design problem is necessarily a unique challenge. Teaching students the skillsto reflect on their design while innovating, in order to advance the design, is essential to teaching design.This also can lead to problems, since if every problem is unique, and the students want a single concreteroadmap for how a project should go, there is bound to be conflict. Valkenberg and Dorst discussed fourdifferent design activities
incorporation of groupwork experiences into cornerstone and capstone experiences, where individual work hashistorically been typical. However, as many institutions are experimenting with alternativemodels that incorporate group work throughout a degree program, there is little understanding ofhow—or whether—students are able to develop the skills they need to work on their own. In thisstudy, we address students’ views towards collaboration and their construction of individualcompetence in a novel transdisciplinary learning environment, where group projects are typicaland individual work is highly atypical.Collaboration and Teamwork SkillsEngineering education researchers have long recognized the importance of collaboration andteamwork, reflecting the
multiple approaches to inquiry to research this particular wicked problem of ourtime. Our course incorporated documentary film, fiction, arts based inquiry, research, andmultiple modes of reflection to frame the design of creative solutions to complex problems.Engaging students in practices of attending to experience introduced them to artistic/creativereflective practices, design thinking, and aesthetic inquiry. Examining how artists interweaveart, science, technology, and math in imaginative artworks that blur boundaries between art,design, and STEM disciplines developed "thinking dispositions that are valued both within andbeyond the arts," (p. x, Hetland, Winner, Veenema, & Sheridan, 2013). In this paper we discuss how an art
already on the market. In order to have a successful crowdfunding campaign, our product needs to differentiate itself to get people to fund our project versus buying a product already on the market. FIGURE 3. EXAMPLE OF AN ANSWERED CONSTRAINT-SOURCE MODEL QUESTION.The design attributes are grouped into sections, as indicated in Table 1. Within its section, eachattribute is listed with an eliciting, reflective question. Students are asked to respond bothquantitatively and qualitatively. On the quantitative side, the CSM provides the
peerreviews and periodic reflections on team dynamics. Interestingly, Giurintano, et al. [8], found aneed to focus on teamwork and leadership coaching after observing a lack of effective teamworkamong interdisciplinary teams. They adopted an approach similar to that discussed here withseveral capstone lectures devoted to teamwork and related topics. They also providedspecialized training to interdisciplinary teams. However, an important difference from ourapproach is that their capstone instructors developed and provided the training. The authorsreported that 70% of students surveyed felt that the material was valuable and only 6% said thatit had no value to them. This outcome supports the validity of our approach.MethodologyOur university is
for students,makerspaces encourage experiential and situated learning experiences through communities ofpractice. Experiential learning is not merely a technique that can be utilized to provide studentswith an experience from which they can learn, but a philosophy of education (Dewey, 1986; A.Y. Kolb & Kolb, 2005). This experiential learning philosophy is characterized by several tenets:learning is (1) a process not an outcome, (2) relearning, (3) resolving conflicts, (4) holisticallyadapting to the world, (5) interacting with the environments, and (6) creating knowledge (Kolb1984). This perspective is built on the notion that knowledge is created from reflecting upon atransformative experience, exemplified through the processes of the
,analyses of award winning products, and a case study of a long-term design project, DesignHeuristics capture the cognitive “rules of thumb” used by designers to intentionally vary their setof candidate designs[23]. These strategies appear to be ones that expert designers employautomatically, without consciously deciding to do so[24]. The heuristics were individuallyextracted across multiple concepts from multiple designers to reflect a useful level of abstractionin describing how to alter design characteristics to create new ones[25]. The resulting set of DesignHeuristics capture 77 different strategies, each of which can be applied independently or in tocreate new designs[26].The set of Design Heuristics is packaged as an instructional tool for
based on standardized nomenclature be developed to structurediscussions about and comparisons between higher education makerspaces. The classification systemwould succinctly indicate the purpose of the space and include indices that reflect the space’saccessibility, population, physical size, and levels of staffing. By establishing a makerspaceclassification system, similar spaces could be more easily compared. Also, the collective practices,standards and equipment within each category of space would produce meaningful metrics to compareeach space to the norm of a classification group.Identifying and Sharing Best Practices in Higher Education MakingUnderstanding the origins of making helps explain the adoption of this form of learning in
, and so on. The negative emotional vocabularies included tired, fatigue,boring, confused, nervous, agitated, regretful, inanimate, monotonous, whiny, exhausted, anda waste-of-time, among others.Using descriptive indexes (frequency, percentage), the positive emotional words and negativeemotional words were analyzed. With the frequency as the ordinate, practice time as abscissa,emotion changing curves have been drawn.The interview method was adopted to deeply and thoroughly study the causes of students’emotional changes. After reading and analyzing all the emotional words, this paper arrangedthe interviews on the emotional fluctuations that were reflected by the curves and thedifference between the two teams; with one teacher from every practice
, Lewin, and Piaget. The second reason is to emphasizethe central role that experience plays in the learning process.”19 Kolb aligns Lewin’s model ofaction research, Dewey’s model of learning, and Piaget’s model of cognitive development intohis own model of experiential learning that he described as “the process whereby knowledge iscreated through the transformation of experience.”Figure 1, utilizing a recast and critiqued version of Kolb’s experiential learning model fromBergsteiner, Avery, & Neumann, illustrates four ways of experiencing: Concrete Experience,Reflective Observation, Abstract Conceptualization, and Active Experimentation. 22 These fourways of experiencing iteratively interact with four distinct learning styles, Diverging
, 2011) argue that while there are three main affordances — proximity,privacy, and permission — that support interactions in a space, finding the right balance amongthem is crucial because “a lopsided distribution is more likely to inhibit than promote beneficialinteractions” (Fayard and Weeks, 2011, p.110). In particular, Fayard and Weeks (2011) stressthat people always interpret what are the appropriate behaviors in a space (e.g., in a librarypeople tend to be silent or speak in a low voice) and that these interpretations often reflect anorganization’s culture.The role of culture is also highlighted in research on makerspaces, especially through the senseof community makerspaces promote and nurture: “Participants often refer to the space as