DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY FOR THE

The Norwegian Council of Education has decided to implement a new course in the two last years of the secondary school in Norway. The course is called “Technology and Science”, TAS, and has as main object to give the pupils an understanding of the roles of a designer, an engineer and a scientist, and show how their work is related to development of products, processes and society. The course had a description, but no specific content or learning materials when it started first time autumn 2007. The course description is very fragmented, and it gives no real support of how to teach and what to teach. Is it possible to use the design process and the design thinking as the leading tread to make TAS become an interesting, challenging course? We looked at this course as a great opportunity to give our future coming students good knowledge of their future roles as designers, engineers or scientists. This was the motivation for developing a tailored model for TAS which communicates the design process in a simple way and shows how it can be used for any kind of project. This paper describes the background for the introduction of TAS and the motivation for developing a pedagogical tool based on design thinking and project based learning. The discussion and evaluation is based on results from a case study and response from teachers of the course