Pupils Identify Key Aspects and Outcomes of a Technological Learning Environment

Over the past two decades, the contribution that a rich learning environment makes toward attaining educational goals such as improvement in learning achievements and attitudes towards studies and school has been considered in educational research (Fraser, Giddings, & McRobbie, 1995; Fraser & Tobin, 1991; Perkins, 1992). The term rich learning environment not only includes physical devices, such as experiment kits or computers, but also the teaching technique, the type of activity pupils engage in, and the method of assessment. Associating science and technology studies with a rich, flexible, computerembedded learning environment may enable pupils to attain higher academic achievements and overcome their cognitive and affective difficulties (Barak, Waks, & Doppelt, 2000). The Creative Thinking and Technology (CTT) program (Barak & Doppelt, 1998) was developed for that purpose. The CTT program’s main goal is to cultivate creative thinking via project-based learning. The program integrates creative thinking tools from the CoRT 1 series of thinking tools (De Bono, 1986) within the technology curriculum (Barak & Doppelt, 1999). The pupils create authentic technological projects and prepare portfolios that are used for assessing the learning process. LEGO/Logo is attractive to technology education, as previous works have shown (Jarvela, 1995; Jarvinen, 1998; Kromholtz, 1998; Papert, 1991; Resnick & Ocko, 1991). The current research shows an application of LEGO/Logo by using pupils’ authentic projects for learning technology as a major subject in high school. This article concentrates on the pupils’ perspective on the preferred learning environment.