Workshop session: collaborative design education

Collaborative design education requires students to work together in teams on design projects to tackle problem solving tasks. This pedagogical practice acknowledges that learning is a social activity during which students will be able to improve their engineering design skills. This has many advantages for improving students’ academic learning and team working as well as social integration with their peers. However, the nature of the work and how this work is shared can make it difficult to ensure that individual team members learning benefited from participating in this learning environment.

From a pedagogical perspective this raises interesting questions regarding how we should engage our students both in terms of solving problems and the collaborative process, as well as the associated assessment of group project work. To ensure all students benefit we should ask; what might be appropriate learning outcomes and assessments to support students’ learning? What range of practices academics could implement in prior and during the collaborative design student’s projects?

This cross-SIG workshop will provide a novel forum for Collaborative Design and Design Education researchers to come together and discuss the context of their research, and exchange ideas relating to different experiences preparing and conducting collaborative project based learning classes. The workshop will be beneficial to researchers at all stages of their investigations.