Constructionist Learning for Environmentally Responsible Product Design

Wayne State University, Penn State University, and Oregon State University are developing a distributed cyberlearning environment to facilitate the consideration of different human controlled/initiated impacts on the natural environment through team-based and personalized design activities. This interactive learning environment, Constructionism in Learning: Sustainable Life Cycle Engineering (CooL:SLiCE), supports a constructionist line of inquiry within design practice to enable students to attain a deeper conceptual understanding. This paper focuses on assessing sustainable product design activities and on applying the findings to educational design to support the constructionist learning method. This preliminary study, conducted in classes at multiple participating universities, shows an intermediate analysis about learner engagement, different level of scaffolding, competency, and the depth of conceptual understandings. The eventual goal is to use assessment items developed from this study to test the appropriateness of the CooL:SLiCE framework (e.g., for the effectiveness of constructed knowledge in deep learning, the impacts of different autonomy levels on student learning, and learners’ engagement).