The nature of engineering design thinking needs to change drastically to address the climate crisis, as the technologies and activities that damage the environment are generated by engineering design. Current engineering design practices, as well as engineering design education (EE) pedagogies, are driven by formal knowledge structures, such as…

In this paper, we have combined a pragmatic and a sociocultural perspective on how artifacts are used in technical problem-solving. With these perspectives we explore how three mechanical engineering students build a plastic spider together, using instructions they found on the internet. Ten hours of video recordings were selected for a detailed…

Design processes can be decomposed into several steps, including information acquisition and application. Retrieving prior knowledge and experience is an important method of acquiring design information, thus designers' precedents retrieval styles reflect their design thinking. The obvious difference between industrial (ID) and mechanical design…

Background: Engineers are socialized to value rational approaches to problem solving. A lack of awareness of how engineers use different decision-making approaches is problematic because it perpetuates the ongoing development of inequitable engineering designs and contributes to a lack of inclusion in the field. Although researchers have explored…

This study explores the relationship between collaborative dynamics, expressed through observed leadership behaviour, and skills. It is based on the mechanical design activity of six dyads of students (post-secondary vocational training), composed of 11 boys and one girl, who are improving an existing mechanical system. Actions are studied using…

Background: Understanding the nature of engineering is important for shaping engineering education, especially precollege education. While much research has established the pedagogical benefits of teaching engineering in kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12), the philosophical foundations of engineering remain under-examined. Purpose: This…

This paper regards the mechanical curriculum teaching as a design problem and uses environment-based design (EBD) method to solve it. First, environment components and their relations of the mechanical curriculum are found out by recursive object model (ROM). Then, conflicts in the teaching process are identified by analysing the above relations.…

Effective scientific communication is crucial for effective science education, as it allows for the sharing of ideas and research findings. This study investigates the impact of the Engineering Design Process (EDP) on pupils' scientific communication skills. A mixed-methods approach was used, combining both quantitative and qualitative data to…

There are myriad understandings of design that have evolved over time and vary by the industries and disciplines that practice it. In the engineering context, design is often described as a process or problem-solving ability. Through interviews with 12 experienced engineers, it was found that there are diverse understandings of the relationship…

Background: To create design solutions experienced engineering designers engage in expert iterative practice. Researchers find that students struggle to learn this critical engineering design practice, particularly when tackling real-world engineering design problems. Purpose/Hypothesis: To improve our ability to teach iteration, this study…

Engineering design decisions have non-trivial implications, and empathic approaches are one way that engineers can understand and translate the perspectives of diverse stakeholders. Prior literature demonstrates that students must develop empathic skills and beliefs that these skills are important to embody empathic approaches in meaningful ways.…

Using rhetorical genre theory, the authors theorize the engineering design process as a type of embodied genre enacted through typified performances of bodies engaged with discourses, texts, and objects in genre-rich spaces of design activity. The authors illustrate this through an analysis of ethnographic data from an engineering design course to…

This article describes the NASA-Funded Space Grant Project BOREALIS: "Balloon Outreach, Research, Exploration, and Landscape Imaging System." BOREALIS conducts high-altitude balloon flights to the "edge of space" with flights typically reaching 100,000 feet and a current record flight in the summer of 2020 that reached 126,000…

Children's picturebooks have long been understood as a powerful medium for exploring aspects of children's lives, experiences, and identities serving as mirrors which allow children to see themselves reflected, as windows through which they can gain insight into the experiences of others, and as sliding glass doors when children are connected to…

Background: There is a growing emphasis on integrating engineering design into K-12 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Prior studies have primarily examined the impact of engineering design on student learning outcomes or employed frequency-based static statistical analyses, rather than focusing on student learning…