Team

Faculty
Susan Finger
Carolyn Rosé
Dan Siewiorek
Asim Smailagic

Current Students
Gahgene Gweon
Sharad Oberoi
Support
We gratefully acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation

Problem
Learning is a prominent activity during design, particularly multi-disciplinary design, but it is difficult to assess

  • Students are novices in design; They are learning process and content simultaneously
  • In student design teams, much of the learning takes place out of view of the instructor
  • Students rate design outcomes over learning; i.e. there is a mismatch of goals:
    • students value good project outcomes
    • instructors value learning outcomes (although they don't always reward it)
Project goal
  • Enable process support and learning interventions without constant presence through the development of an in-process assessment tool to give faculty feedback on student productivity
  • Develop an in-process assessment tool to give faculty feedback on student productivity
Questions
  • Can we capture enough in-process data to know what is going on in the teams?
  • What do faculty want to know in order to assess learning?
  • Can we replicate existing measures of team performance using an automated tool?
Design Education Testbed
RPCS: Rapid prototyping of computer systems

  • Interdisciplinary, capstone design course
  • Ambitious projects, e.g.
  • GM companion car-driver interface
  • Context aware cell-phone
  • Wireless classroom on the Voyager science boat
Data Capture
With the Kiva, we can capture most of the student conversations that would normally go through email and chat. For the project courses we studied, each course Kiva contained hundreds of topic threads and thousands of individual posts and files.
Instructor assessment needs
Structured interviews with 9 project course instructors resulted in three coarse grained assessment categories and two parallel groups of assessment categories: