Investigating the role of spatial thinking in children’s design ideation through an open-ended design-by-analogy challenge

Spatial thinking is ubiquitous in design. Design education across all age groups encompasses a range of spatially challenging activities, such as forming and modifying mental representations of ideas, and visualizing the scenarios of design prototypes being used. While extensive research has examined the cognitive processes of spatial...

Cognitive and embodied mapping of data: an examination of children’s spatial thinking in data physicalization

Understanding and effectively using visual representations is important to learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Various techniques to visualize information, such as two- and three-dimensional graphs, diagrams, and models, not only expand our capacity to work with different types of information but also actively...

How focus creates engagement in Primary Design and Technology Education: The effect of well-defined tasks and joint presentations on a class of nine to twelve years old pupils

During a Design and Technology class, engagement is both required to start creative hands-on work and a sign of pupil’s creative thinking. To find ways to achieve engagement, we can look to the Montessori tradition. Due to the fact that learning is regarded as feeding insight through experimenting, tasks have to offer pupils the opportunity to...

Towards constructive design feedback dialogues: guiding peer and client feedback to stimulate children’s creative thinking

Design feedback is an essential pedagogical tool that can help young novice designers navigate divergent and convergent paths while designing. However, design feedback is often met with resistance, which counteracts its potential to help novice designers evaluate their design and generate new solution directions. In this paper, we report on...

Uncovering early indicators of fixation during the concept development stage of children’s design processes

In this paper, we explore the early indicators of design fixation occurring during the concept development stage of children’s design processes. This type of fixation, which we named: concept fixation, causes a blind adherence to the current (possibly unfavourable) state of a design idea. Its occurrence hampers the creative thinking processes...

Attention and Action during the Design and Technology lesson: by fine-tuning task characteristics

In this paper, pupils’ design behaviour is regarded as an expression of active knowledge acquisition. Four cases of building a task structure, which supports effective discovery learning, were investigated. We focus on simple characteristics in a model to explain the effects of the structure on task execution. It reconciles<br/>the advantages of...

Initiation of verbal expression in young children in Design and Technology education: a case-study

One of the core activities of Design and Technology Education is designing, which is a thinking activity that benefits greatly from expression. Verbal expression serves interaction. A teacher can induce verbal expression in pupils by inviting them to interact about familiar subjects. This interaction is a stepping stone towards an integration of...

Groundwork: Preparing an effective basis for communication and shared learning in design and technology education

In Dutch Design and Technology Education the beginning of a process of learning is usually determined by the teacher. In this paper it is argued that a beginning, determined in interaction with the students, is more profitable as the interaction will lead to joined-up exploring, creating and thinking and an increased motivation to learn....