Exploring students' experimentation strategies in engineering design using an educational CAD tool

Engineering design is an iterative process that supports the solution of problems by applying scientific knowledge to make informed decisions. Assessing different levels of expertise in experimentation is a difficult task since these are not usually visible as part of a student's final design solution. The purpose of this research is to investigate and characterize students' experimentation strategies while working on a design challenge. We conducted a concurrent think-aloud to capture students' thinking while they were working on a design challenge using an educational computer-aided design (CAD) software. We showed how the design replays generated from the log files collected from the CAD software can be used to represent students' experimentation strategies and how these representations can be validated by the data collected from the think-aloud. Our preliminary results show that technology-based assessment by the educational CAD tool allows us to identify the differences between different experimentation strategies and that the result of this assessment is supported by the result obtained from the concurrent think-aloud. Implications of this work would be relevant to engineering educators and researchers who are interested in understanding and assessing students' experimentation strategies in engineering design.