Multimodal Data Analysis of Collaborative Design Learning with Children

Middle school students’ learning of engineering concepts, a crucial component in the STEM education pipeline, has been widely documented to benefit from experiential learning activities. However, traditional classroom activities, which often focus on abstract operations, often fail to immerse students in authentic engineering de- sign problems, let alone to familiarize students with the iterative engineering design processes. Product Design is a subject matter that has been studied for many decades within the engineering industry. It is an iterative and often highly structured process that utilizes applications of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) concepts to develop the functionality and manufacturability aspects of a product. Incorporating such design courses at the school level allows students to question, experiment, refine, and connect theoretical knowledge with human experience and understanding, independent of its applicability. This thesis presents two toy design workshops designed and developed to engage middle school students in the different stages of the design process and provide a platform for the students to tinker, iterate, prototype their ideas to develop concrete relationship representation of theoretical knowledge and real world applications. Modified from a graduate design course, the 2015 workshop aimed to encourage and develop an innovative thinking process of inspiration, ideation, imagination, iteration and implementation. The hands-on design practices through constructivist and embodied cognition theories provided the foundation for achieving embedded learn- ing and engagement among the participants. Immersing the middle school students in a material rich environment and teaching design and physics concepts through hands-on engineering design and making activities showed to have a positive influence on students self-efficacy. Improving from the insights and experiences from the 2015 workshop, the 2016 toy design workshop curricula was redesigned to engage students in the various stages of the design process with robots as the focus. A mixed method study of twenty- five middle-school students who participated in the two-week toy design workshop was done in order to understand the influence of task engagement and interaction through different modalities such as verbal, visual and tangible interactions affect design quality and student self-efficacy. In this team-based, active learning work- shop, students were introduced to engineering design and fabrication through a set of five activities – structure design, sketching, reverse engineering of toys, CAD, mechanism construction with automata– culminating in custom-designed functional robot building. Informed by concepts from project-based learning, design interaction, and design thinking, the degree to which students interacted through verbal, visual, and tangible modalities during three stages of design - planning, building and testing was analyzed. Our analysis of the multi-modal data demonstrated new insights relating design interaction to self-efficacy and design quality. For example, high-quality teams demonstrated greater engagement in tangible building and verbal interaction with coaches during building whereas low-quality teams demonstrated less interaction in all modalities during planning and building stages. The observations of the interaction modalities in specific stages of design are discussed for three exemplar teams in the context of design quality and learning outcomes