Contribution: This study identifies the skills required by the faculty to mentor first-year interdisciplinary design projects. The findings are compiled as a set of themes that can act as a guide for engineering educators in mentoring interdisciplinary design projects. Background: The National Academy of Engineering's (NAE) Engineer of 2020 report…

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…

Design education has moved towards a collaborative practice where designers work in teams and with other disciplines to solve unstructured problems. Along with the cognitive skills involved in the execution of the design process, designers also need skills to work in teams, share information, negotiate common ground and reach consensus.…

Design and design thinking are increasingly being taught across several disciplines--ranging from arts, architecture, and technology and engineering to business schools--where expertise plays a central role. A substantial corpus of literature on research in regard to design expert and design expertise has accumulated in the last decades. However,…

Design and problem solving are central to technology and have distinguished learning in technology from other curriculum areas. This research investigated how expert technologists learn design and problem solving through experience. Data was collected from four expert technologists and this information was analysed using learning theories that…

The focus of Design and Technology (D&T) education (Wilson & Harris, 2004) has been on designing and making activities and in developing technological capabilities amongst students. Innovation is an important aspect of D&T that helps in creating new products and artefacts to overcome the limitations of existing ones. Problem solving…

This exploratory study uses the convergent design of mixed methods to integrate adaptive expertise theory to study how individual student participant from graphic design or non-graphic-design majors to solve a novel ideation problem in graphic design. Adaptive expertise includes six dimensions: metacognition, flexibility, dynamic knowledge,…

Design activities typically involve and culminate in the creation of models representative of new ideas and conceptions. The format is often dictated by the specific discipline, with ideas in design and technology education regularly being externalised through the use of computer aided design (CAD). This paper focusses on the realisation stage of…

Design education exists to prepare students for design practice. Yet the goal state, design expertise, remains poorly defined. This paper presents a critical cross disciplinary literature synthesizing literature across design, engineering, expertise, creativity, and new evidence from a cognitive task analysis of expert designers to explore…

Background: Because design is recognized as a critical element of engineering thinking, it is crucial for educators to utilize the most effective methods to teach engineering problem solving. Results from this study of students' thinking process may shape future teaching methods. Purpose: This article explores the differences in design processes…

This study presents the findings of a systematic literature review on educational computer game development activity utilized in learning environments. The main aim of this review is to investigate the effects of game design activity on learning outcomes of students. Additionally, there are other factors examined in the review such as participant…

"Making" represents an increasingly popular label for describing a form of engineering design. While making is growing in popularity, there are still open questions about the strategies that students are using in these activities. Assessing and improving learning in making/ engineering design contexts require that we have a better…

The authors investigated the differences in using problem decomposition and problem recomposition between dyads of engineering experts, engineering seniors, and engineering freshmen. Participants worked in dyads to complete an engineering design challenge within 1 hour. The entire design process was video and audio recorded. After the design…

Empirical evidence on the way in which expert designers from different domains cognitively connect their internal processes with external resources is presented in the context of an extended cognition model. The article focuses briefly on the main trends in the extended design cognition theory and in particular on recent trends in information…

Although the consensus seems to be that high-school-level introductory engineering courses should focus on design, this creates a problem for teacher training. Traditionally, math and science teachers are trained to teach and assess factual knowledge and closed-ended problem-solving techniques specific to a particular discipline, which is unsuited…