The Design Compass: A Computer Tool for Scaffolding Students' Metacognition and Discussion about their Engineering Design Process

This paper reports on the Design Compass, a classroom tool for helping students record and reflect on their design process as they work on and complete a design challenge. The Design Compass software provides an interface where students can identify and record the various design steps they used while performing them, and add digital notes and pictures to document their work. In the Design Log view, students can review steps taken, and print the record of work done, which can be shared and discussed with their instructor or classmates. The paper describes the concepts underlying the creation of the Design Compass, its features as a metacognitive tool and how it works, and provides scenarios of its use as a teaching and assessment tool with eighth-grade technology education students, and in teacher professional development workshops. The Design Compass Concept The Design Compass [DC] is an educational tool that students can use to identify and record the steps in the engineering design process that they use while designing. It was developed as part of the work of a NSF-funded IEECI project, “Using RoboBooks To Build Scalable K12/Engineering Partnerships” (NSF 08-35949, 0836008), a collaborative effort between Tufts University and City College of New York. The Design Compass supports students in representing and documenting their design process, and enables them to share a log of their work with others (teachers, observers and peers). Traditionally, as students work through a design challenge, the teacher provides some scaffolding regarding what design step the students should do, perhaps advising them, for example, to Copyright © 2009, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. attempt some timely research, or to brainstorm for new approaches if the team has gotten fixated on a particular approach. Students are often asked to create a post-hoc portfolio of their design project work; however, they are rarely given the tools to collect portfolio data of their work in real time. Flashes of inspirations and insights that frequently occur during designing are often forgotten by the time a student documents the session’s work. The Design Compass provides an overview of students’ work that is based on aggregated, quantitative data associated with the design steps and includes digital notes and images of sketches and prototypes useful in summative portfolio reporting. Features and Theory Behind the Design Compass The current Design Compass prototype is an interpreted software program that is run using the LabViewTM-based ROBOLABTM programming environment. The user interface has two pages. The Compass page (see Figure 1) displays a standard engineering design process model (Massachusetts DOE, 2006), means for entering short textbased descriptions and digital snapshots of sketches or prototypes to be entered by users, and clocks to note time spent on each design step. The Log page (see Figure 2) provides a spreadsheet-styled chronological list of steps taken, and is the place where users can view, edit and append the logged information. By clicking on another button in the Log, students can view aggregated data in histogram form on steps they have taken during a single design session or an entire design project. The Compass’ clickable picture of the design cycle scaffolds students’ recall of the design process and metacognitive thinking about their work, while generating an reviewable record or Log of recent or distant past iterations of design work. Metacognition involves the monitoring of oneself and others regarding tasks that are