Over the past four years the authors have developed an online version of the Delta Design game, a board game which was developed by Bucciarelli (1) to teach students design collaboration skills. In the online version, players move tiles on a shared virtual board and communicate only through text chat. In addition, the objective functions are computed automatically each time a tile is moved, so the focus of the game changes from rapid number-crunching to negotiation. Since every state of the board, along with micro-level team performance and chat data, are captured, the resulting corpus from 38 four-player team games provides a rich resource to explore different aspects of collaborative team practices. This paper gives an overview of the online implementation of Delta Design and discusses the findings from user studies including several undergraduate capstone design classes. Observations of the board-moving tactics show that teams planning a strategy before starting the game or players sharing details about their role’s constraints with other team members do not have much effect on the game’s outcome. Finally, this paper demonstrates that the complex rules of the Delta Design game make it a suitable candidate for analyzing collaboration strategies in team-based design projects.
For both student and professional design teams, knowledge generated during the design process frequently goes uncaptured, and when it is captured, it is usually poorly organized and buried in obscure documents. The design and development process requires that collaborators build and retain knowledge through discussions, creating documents and sharing artifacts. Effective capture of both semantic knowledge and episodic knowledge can have many benefits for both student and professional design teams. The key to supporting these knowledge building problems is to develop an infrastructure that supports effective knowledge management. In this paper, we describe a framework for DesignWebs, which are dynamic, navigable networks of the documents and conversations created during the design process. A DesignWeb would enable users to see evolving connections between concepts by using a navigable web-based interface that synthesizes the design knowledge from multiple sources of information.
Most engineering project classes expect teams of students to collaborate and to build on existing knowledge to accomplish their project goals. As the project evolves, the team is expected to develop a shared understanding. However, students often become overwhelmed by the amount of information available and lose sight of the big picture. Instructors may also find it difficult to keep track of individual and team activities and are often forced to evaluate the product instead of the learning process. This paper presents preliminary results from a tool that supports effective knowledge management for engineering design projects. This framework, called DesignWebs, automatically extracts conceptual maps from the team’s evolving set of documents and discussions about an engineering artifact. It uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation, hierarchical clustering, and other machine learning techniques to generate a navigable web-based graph. Both instructors and students can browse this graph interactively to explore the concepts embedded inside design team documents and the connections between them. An experiment performed on documents obtained from a project course shows the effectiveness of DesignWebs in synthesizing the design knowledge from multiple sources of information in engineering project teams.
Project-based courses challenge students by presenting them with real-world situations in which they have to constantly balance their time and efforts between formulating the problem, exploring and adapting concepts to their problem domain, and documenting their progress to present to clients and instructors. Although it is widely accepted that project-based courses benefit students, the explicit role of project milestones in the progress of the project is not well understood. This paper addresses the effect of milestones by examining the vocabulary used in an inter-disciplinary project-based course in online discussions as well as design documentation. Noun phrases, which are surrogates for design concepts, vary throughout the three phases in the class. The data is then divided into editing/ presentation and design categories and the noun phrases used in the two categories are compared. Students must allocate their time between designing and documenting and we observe that their design activities often peak just after the documentation deadlines. The paper concludes that instructors need to be aware of the role played by explicit project deadlines in project based courses. A delicate balance between externalization and active student collaboration is required for effective student learning experience.
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