Teaching open-ended problem solving and design skills
© 2017 EPFL
A diverse group of 33 people including section directors, students, lab technicians, teaching assistants and staff came together last week for this event, which conceptualized a curriculum for teaching open-ended problem solving and design skills across the 5 years of study at EPFL
Facilitated by a team from CoDesign-it! with a set of rapid prototyping kits, participants created physical spaces, videos, 2D and 3D objects. The intention was not to prototype the curriculum itself, but rather to use the prototyping process as a means of facilitating collaboration and engagement from stakeholders.
At EPFL, we have excellent fundamental courses, opportunities to apply this knowledge in design courses, projects and internships, and exciting new initiatives through the Discovery Learning Labs and Discovery Learning Projects. However this increasingly diverse landscape poses challenges in terms of how to ensure the different offers are complementary and ideally synergistic.
Rapid prototyping engages a participatory design approach between stakeholders and had not been previously applied to curriculum development before the June 8th event, which was co-organised by the Teaching Support Centre and the Discovery Learning Programme.
Participants designed architectural spaces, short videos, and apps to represent their ideas for an ideal curriculum. These various “languages” offered different ways to represent the skills and experiences central to developing solutions to real-life engineering problems and, in doing so, allowed numerous dimensions to emerge. Participants came to a better and shared understanding of the issues, the practical implications of which will be picked up in further workshops.
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