International Journal of Technology and Design Education

Spatial thinking skills are vital for success in everyday living and work, not to mention the centrality of spatial reasoning in scientific discoveries, design-based disciplines, medicine, geosciences and mathematics to name a few. This case study describes a course in spatial thinking and communicating designed and delivered by an interdisciplinary team over a three-year period to first-year university students. Four major elements provide a framework for the sequencing of instruction and acquisition of 2D and 3D spatial thinking and reasoning skills in a computational design context. We describe the process of introducing students to computational design environments beginning with a fun and familiar tool in preparation for a more complex, industry-standard system (SolidWorks). A design project provides diverse student teams an opportunity to integrate and apply foundational spatial concepts and skills including sketching, 2D and 3D representations, as well as digital and physical modeling. Samples of student work illustrate the scaffolding necessary for students to successfully draw upon the spatial thinking and communication skills required to complete their team projects beginning with applying sketching techniques; modeling individual 3D parts; creating digital assemblies; and finally building the equivalent 3D physical model. Key instructional principles provide a framework for the analysis of what worked and what didn’t in relation to spatial skills development in students. The lessons learned are identified along with potential future directions for teaching and learning scholarship in spatial thinking development within a computational design context.

The meaning of technology seems simple. Most people have little difficulty expressing some notion of what it is. Technology is machine, automobile, computer, tool ... the list goes on and on. For some, technology is defined in contrast to other academic disciplines such as science or engineering. It is clear that science and technology are woven throughout a larger complex of human activity which is oriented around a mix of economic, political, humanitarian, and cultural means and ends. However, it is also clear that the knowledge base, processes, and goals of technology are distinctly different from science. This paper depicts technology as consisting of four distinct conceptual dimensions. These are (a) artefact, (b) knowledge, (c) process, and (d) volition (Mitcham, 1979). The goals are to clarify and explore the conceptual complexities of technology in order to provide a conceptual foundation for the study of Technology Education for all. A central mission of education should be to orient people to the cultures within which they are living and making decisions. Given that technology and technological systems are important in every culture around the world, it is absolutely essential that they become a primary focus of study.

This research investigated how secondary school technology teachers planned and implemented units that enabled students to access authentic technological practice through their contact with a community of practice (CoP). It was found that when teachers plan to access a community of practice for their students a complex dance-style relationship develops between the three parties involved. Unplanned interactions can have a significant effect on the planned teaching unit. If teachers are reflexive to the demands of the student and the CoP representative, there is the potential for the development of teaching programmes with technological outcomes that reflect authentic technological practice.

This paper seeks to contribute to the growing literature on children and computer programming by focusing on a programming language for children in Kindergarten through second grade. Sixty-two students were exposed to a 6-week curriculum using ScartchJr. They learned foundational programming concepts and applied those concepts to create personally meaningful projects using the ScratchJr programming app. This paper addresses the following research question: Which ScratchJr programming blocks do young children choose to use in their own projects after they have learned them all through a tailored programming curriculum? Data was collected in the form of the students’ combined 977 projects, and analyzed for patterns and differences across grades. This paper summarizes findings and suggests potential directions for future research. Implications for the use of ScratchJr as an introductory programming language for young children are also discussed.

This article aims to illuminate different means of nurturing creativity in the high-tech industry and in modern organizations, particularly in the context of problem solving and product development, and to examine the potential implications for technology education. There is a large gap between conventional wisdom, which maintains that technology education is intended to foster creative thinking among pupils, and reality in the field. The case study presented is that of a mid-sized Israeli industrial plant, dealing with the design and production of construction tools for professionals and domestic use, such as spirit levels, measuring tapes, squares and rulers. This plant utilized innovation, uniqueness and quality as the main instruments in the battle for the market. A series of workshops for the plant's staff, entitled ‘Systematic Inventive Thinking’, resulted in the development of a range of new, original and successful products. The cumulative experience indicated that people can learn efficient techniques for solving a problem, or developing a new product, by breaking it down to its basic components, by ‘playing' systematically with ideas, in order to achieve new results. The notion that methodical courses can trigger pupils' incentive to be innovative and original, and can foster teamwork is almost absent from the field of education. Educators and scholars in technology education pay little regard to teaching and exploiting methods to fostering systematic original thinking and problem-solving. The challenge in education is to find an optimal combination and balance between fostering activity based on openness and ‘disorder’, on the one hand, and imparting systematic methods for innovative thinking and problem-solving, on the other.

One of the goals of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is to promote students’ understanding of and interest in STEM careers. However, young students often hold stereotypical perceptions of STEM professionals. This study aimed to apply two newly developed checklists to explore upper elementary students’ perceptions of scientists, engineers, and technologists as STEM professionals. A total of 564 valid responses were collected from fourth- to sixth-grade students. The data were collected using an instrument revised from the Draw-A-Scientist Test (Chambers in Sci Educ 67(2):255–265, 1983). Content analysis was conducted on students’ drawings and written descriptions of the STEM professionals’ work with the newly developed checklists and a categorization process, and inter-rater reliabilities were calculated to ensure trustworthiness. Results show that both girls and boys drew more male than female scientists, engineers, and technologists. Moreover, students tended to associate scientists with laboratory-related features, engineers with building construction, and technologists with technological products. In addition, students’ perceptions of scientists, engineers and technologists fell into seven major categories of careers, and students overwhelmingly placed inventors and programmers into their presentations of scientists and technologists, respectively, rather of engineers. The results indicate that gender stereotypes existed pervasively in the students’ perceptions of scientists, engineers, and technologists, with engineers being the most stereotyped. Moreover, the students associated engineers with various professions related to civil construction and did not see many other engineering professionals as engineers, implying that students generally have a naïve understanding about engineering. The mechanism underlying the formation of these stereotypes and potential countermeasures are discussed.

An analysis of the way in which primary age children design, particularly when working with a professional designer, suggests that there are several similarities in approach between the two. This observation is supported by evidence from developmental psychology, which has stressed the crucial role which ‘play’ performs in developing children's inventiveness and ability to solve problems. Subsequent research focusing on children's designing suggests that this play is fundamental to designing activity, and extends naturally into the more formalised activities of drawing and modelling. Through playing and using narrative language to describe their actions, children are learning to interpret their own mental images. To develop these images and make them more concrete children use their hands in drawing and modelling whilst drawing on their accumulated personal knowledge about the activity of designing, in a similar way to that in which professional designers make use of their own, highly sophisticated skills to bring an idea to concrete fruition. By comparison with some of the rigid models of ‘the design process’ described in schools, designers and children may have more in common than we realise.