By Susan Bitetti, Staff Member

With the increase of engineering design activities in K-12 classrooms comes a new set of challenges to educators and policy-makers.  Previous studies have demonstrated the benefits of incorporating design tasks into formal education curriculum; however, a gap in research still remains surrounding how additional tools can best support students and teachers in these less than traditional learning environments.  For my thesis research, I designed, tested, and evaluated a tool made with the intent of specifically supporting the practice of documentation during engineering design tasks within formal education settings.  Documentation can promote habits of self-reflection and organization, while also providing content that can be supportive of a group of communication efforts and sharing.  I set out to create a tool that would not only encourage sketching, which has been long established as a valued skill of the engineering discipline, but would also allow for other multimodal representations.  Due to the iterative nature of design and testing of the tool, a documentation station, I observed student tendencies in response to both the changes in tool design and the different kinds of design tasks.  Analysis of classroom video footage, student-generating content, and survey data suggested that students and teachers found different affordances and drawbacks to the documentation station and the practice of documentation itself.  This research also yielded a set of design principles to guide the development of any future documentation tools intended to support young students in engineering task.