The role of "design" in the exploration of integrated "Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics" (STEM) education has rapidly expanded in recent years. "Design" has made an important contribution by providing instructional scaffolds in synthesising knowledge from multiple disciplines to solve real-world…

Most innovations have contextual pre-cursors that prompt new ways of thinking and in their turn help to give form to the new reality. This was the case with the e-scape software development process. The origins of the system existed in software components and ideas that we had developed through previous projects, but the ultimate direction we took…

In the opening paper in this Special Edition I outlined the major issues that led to the establishment of "project e-scape". The project was intended to develop systems and approaches that enabled learners to build real-time web-based portfolios of their performance (initially) in design & technology and additionally to build systems…

In this article I describe the context within which we developed project e-scape and the early work that laid the foundations of the project. E-scape (e-solutions for creative assessment in portfolio environments) is centred on two innovations. The first concerns a web-based approach to portfolio building; allowing learners to build their…

This paper reports on the results of a 3-year study conducted at the Centre for Schooling and Learning Technologies (CSaLT) at Edith Cowan University in collaboration with the Curriculum Council of Western Australia which concerns the potential to use digital technologies to represent the output from assessment tasks in the senior secondary…

This paper describes an action research, school situated project conducted with partnership funding from Learning and Teaching Scotland, Scottish Qualifications Authority and Becta, the UK government's agency for communications technology in education. Based on "e-scape" (e-solutions for creative assessment in portfolio environments),…