Supporting collaborative learning in engineering design

Abstract

In team-based project courses, collaborative learning is the dominant learning mode. Collaborative learning has been shown to increase individual learning through co-construction and personal reflection. Rapid adoption of web-based communication and mobile computing by students provide opportunities to take advantage of computer-supported collaboration for engineering education. We present preliminary findings on a computer environment, the Kiva Web, that supports the activities of group collaboration for interdisciplinary engineering design teams. We have employed methods from human–computer interaction (HCI) to iterate on the design in the context of use. In this paper, we discuss the evolution of the Kiva Web and the implications for both student design teams and professional design teams.

Introduction

For both student and professional design teams, the design and development process requires that collaborators build and retain knowledge through discussions, sharing artifacts, and creating documents. The team design process also requires coordination of schedules, artifacts, documents, deadlines, and deliverables. Teams need to develop a shared language in order to communicate well. However, collaborators often have pressures that undermine coordination. Team members come and go, even in academic settings. Team members deal with competing priorities from work, school, and personal demands. Finally, for both student and professional collaborators, dedicated project space is at a premium. Meeting spaces need to be cleared at the end of a meeting, and team members leave a meeting with pieces of a puzzle that needs to be reconstructed at the beginning of the next meeting. Often critical pieces are missing so the team is either unable to proceed or revisits decisions they have already made.

The differences between engineering design teams in universities and those in industry are numerous. Students are novices both in their domain knowledge and in their knowledge of the design process. Students work in unstructured teams of peers, even if roles such as team leader have been assigned. They often judge their success by the grade they earn or by the artifacts they produce. The client, whether it is a professor or a company, rarely plans to use the team’s design directly. Rather, the goal is for the students to learn about the design process and to master new domain knowledge. On the other hand, professionals are expected to be domain experts, assigned to projects based on their skills, producing a product that the company can profit from. Learning, and the accumulation of shared knowledge, is rarely an explicit goal for industrial teams. For all these reasons, collaboration tools designed for teams in industry seldom work well for student teams. In response, design faculty on many campuses have begun to work on collaboration tools for student design teams, particularly for teams that are not co-located. Those working in this area include Ion et al., 1999, Kirschman and Greenstein, 2002, Lahti et al., 2004, Milne and Winograd, 2003, Subrahmanian et al., 2001.

Using an iterative, user-centered design process, we have designed and built tools to support students learning through collaboration. We have been conducting empirical studies to evaluate their usability and their contribution to learning for student design teams. We have designed the tools to facilitate learning through co-construction and reflection. Co-construction is the successful activity of knowledge building and problem solving between individuals (Miyake & Shirouzu, 2002). Reflection, discussion, and disagreement promote critical thinking (Li, 2003). This paper reviews the iterative design and development process of these tools. The environment is called the Kiva, which is a Native American gathering place.