Design students must develop competence in a wide range of areas in order to be successful in their future practice. Increasingly, knowledge of design methods is used to frame both a designer's repertoire and their overall facility as a designer. However, there is little research on how students build cognitive schema in relation to design methods…

While teamwork has been a central concern in engineering education, little research has systematically examined how conflict is managed in engineering teams of students. Socio-constructivism provides a solid base to explain how teamwork can foster innovation through the use of cultural artifacts, such as "boundary objects." The purpose…

In this work a matrix-type tool is used to assist design-engineering students to develop product design projects. The 'specifications-factors-concepts matrix' or SFCM is proposed as a specific tool to organize and relate product requirements, design factors and projected solutions. Taking into account the early stages of the design process, two…

This paper investigates iteration and fixation in design by mining digital footprints left by designers. High school students used computer-aided design software to create buildings in an urban area, with the goal of applying passive solar design techniques to ensure optimal solar gains of the buildings throughout a year. Students were required to…

Assessments of new pedagogical practices usually rely on instructor oriented surveys and questionnaires to measure student perceptions of teaching methods; however, fixed response categories in structured questionnaires might bias results. This paper demonstrates a mixed methods approach using open and multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) for a…

Initiatives to integrate engineering design in the elementary science classroom have become increasingly evident in both national reform documents and classroom practice. Missing from these efforts is a purposeful attempt to capture students' designerly thinking and dialogues as they engage in the process. The purpose of this study was to…

The design of this study was a multiple case study conducted to examine the knowledge, pedagogical principles, and challenges involved in providing engineering-oriented professional development for teachers at the secondary school level. A set of criteria was used to identify five representative projects for analysis in the US. A variety of tools…

This paper reports on a novel approach taken by the author to the teaching of an Internet programming course targeted at final year diploma and second year degree students. The uniqueness of engineers and their identity is discussed, as is the self-constructed world and ways of knowing in which humankind operates. The novel approach to teaching a…

Learner-centred approaches follow the prevailing tendency in modern University reforms which are primarily concerned about "how people learn". The methodologies can be learner-centred in the sense of placing the student as the main actor of the teaching-learning process by increasing his interactivity and participation, but also…