Promoting Productive Disciplinary Engagement in Engineering Design Using a CAD tool

Abstract

Engaging young students with the engineering design process and scaffolding the learning Of effective design thinking Skills is an ongoing endeavor for engineering education researchers. In this design and deployment paper, we describe the design of an innovative curricular material using a computer aided design (CAD) tool for promoting productive engagement with disciplinary practices of tradeoffs and design optimization. We present preliminary qualitative findings from our design based research study that indicate the effectiveness of our intervention and highlight ongoing as well as future work by our team to advance the community's understanding of how to effectively scaffold the learning of effective design thinking skills via technology as well as curricular materials.