In the field of user experience (UX), there is a wide range of skills that practitioners are expected to acquire and demonstrate as a competitive candidate for a job. Previous research identified three main skill categories of UX practitioners: technical skills, human skills, and dispositions. However, as educators, we have found that students…

An ever-increasing array of design visualisation tools are available to designers. As such, design education is constantly challenged to keep up with these trends so that students are best equipped for entering industrial practice. This paper reports a study into the use of digital sketching, a relatively new digital visualisation tool. The study…

This paper is a systematic literature review of works focused on user-centred design practices and their potential application in pedagogical contexts in design and technology (D&T) education. It is a response to the increasingly complex demand of allowing students to develop so-called 21st-century skills within a D&T curriculum, which is…

Spatial skills are crucial to STEM disciplines and involve a variety of cognitive processes and skills related to visualising, reasoning and communicating about spatial relations. Particularly in the primary school years, attaining 'spatial literacy' gives children a valuable set of skills and knowledge that can aid them in successful…

Soft skills are interpersonal, social, and emotional competencies, transversal to various fields of knowledge and life. In the Knowledge Age, soft skills play an essential role in the differentiation of human work. Nevertheless, in design education, there are still few studies on soft skills. This study brings a conceptual map of soft skills in…

In an attempt to resolve some of the gaps associated with the pedagogical integration of teamwork in design curricula, this article seeks to share a model for learning teamwork skills. This model is the result of a multiple case study methodology based on the learning experiences of 22 design students. Data was collected during various team…

This research investigates students' argumentation quality in engineering design thinking. We implemented Learning by Evaluating (LbE) using Adaptive Comparative Judgment (ACJ), where students assess pairs of items to determine the superior one. In ACJ, students provided rationales for their critiques, explaining their selections. Fifteen students…

A wide range of design literature discusses the role of the studio and its related pedagogy in the development of design thinking. Scholars in a variety of design disciplines pose a number of factors that potentially affect this development process, but a full understanding of these factors as experienced from a critical pedagogy or student…

In the age of "Big Data," information is often quantitative in nature. The ability to analyze information through the sifting of data has been identified as a core competency for success in navigating daily life and participation in the contemporary workforce. This skill, known as Quantitative Reasoning (QR), is characterized by the…

Reflective writing is an efficient way of getting feedback from students. Paper-based or web-based course evaluation questionnaires alone may lack of collecting specific and detailed information, especially for the fields like design education. This study focuses on reflections captured from students via two different media--personal magazine and…

This paper has emerged out of the author's life-long passion for Design and Technology (D&T), which she will refer to as D&T from now on, her on-going research which has informed her practice as a teacher of D&T in England over the past 45 years, and in particular her practice as a trainer of D&T teachers for the past 20 years. In…