Creating A Learning Community In A Freshman Design Course With A Senior High School Class And A Freshman Graphics Class

The importance of developing “learning communities” in which students interact with those outside their class has recently been emphasized by several national educational initiatives, including the National Science Foundation. This paper discusses how a learning community is used in an engineering design course to teach students to work on design teams in which team members have diverse educational backgrounds, and are located at different geographic locations. This simulates the design environment that is common in industry. The learning community is formed by coordinating the curricula from three different courses: a college freshman design course, a college freshman graphics course, and a high school technology course. The learning community is established to design a product. Students from each course participate in the design process at different levels. The primary design responsibility is with the freshman design class. The design documentation is provided through the interaction between the high school students and the students in the freshman graphics class. The fabrication responsibility lies on the high school students. The designs are tested and analyzed in the freshman design class. At each step of the design, students from the three separate courses must communicate through email and video conferencing in order to coordinate their separate design efforts. The primary objectives of the learning community are to: 1) develop communication skills necessary for meaningful technical interaction between colleagues with diverse educational backgrounds; 2) develop students’ awareness that material taught in one course is related and applied in other courses; and 3) develop communication and research skills within the design process early in students’ careers. This paper presents detailed curricular objectives, describes how the curricula from the separate courses were coordinated, and provides results obtained by assessing student learning.