Open Conference Systems, 11th DATTArc-ICTE-TENZ-ITEEA 2022

Font Size: 
Diversity of design solutions to help another person in a real world problem context
Megha Suryakant Chougule, Anisha Malhotra-Dalvi, Sugra Chunawala, Adithi Muralidhar

Building: BUILDING C
Room: Breakout Room C616 ♠︎
Date: 2022-12-09 11:30 AM – 12:05 PM
Last modified: 2022-12-12

Abstract


Real-world problems have the potential to fuel children's creativity and engage them in higher-order thinking skills. It has been observed that given an opportunity, students creatively develop solutions to real-world problems (Ara et al., 2009). Studies suggest that working with problems having multiple solutions can give a sense of autonomy to children (James, Clark, & Cropanzano, 1999). Taking this into account, an open-ended design activity set in a real-world context was developed in the D&T lab at our institute. The design problem was to design a toolkit to help a car mechanic from losing her tools. This toolkit activity was tested with a hundred and twelve middle school students in two different setups- one in a school and the second at our institute as part of the National Science Day (NSD). Given that students from varied backgrounds attend NSD, the activity sheet which had been prepared in English was translated into Hindi and Marathi, which are local languages. Students worked in groups of three to five and they had to conceptualize and draw their design solutions as well. This paper describes the nature and diversity of students' design solutions. A preliminary analysis suggests that students' ideas had common elements; but, the solutions were found to be distinct in the ways these elements were used. Almost half the solutions referred to electronic components. Broadly, students' design solutions could be categorized as (a) wearables with and without electronic components (b) non-wearables with and without electronic components.

 


Open access for this conference will begin on 2023-12-12.