Design & Inquiry
According to National Science Education Standards
students' doing technological design
should be able to solve simple design problems, analyze
technological products and systems, and assess product
quality. "This standard helps establish design as the
technological parallel to inquiry in science." Both
scientific inquiry and design are included in the National
Science Education Standards. Scientific inquiry
aims to study nature, while technological design proposes
solutions to human needs. Both involve open-ended discovery
and the use ideas creatively to explore the physical
world.
Few dispute that engineers and scientists both do
design. Engineers create products to meet human needs,
while scientists devise instruments and experiments
to test their theories about nature. The strategies
of engineers and scientists in solving design tasks
have been studied, and are quite different. Engineers
tend to learn about a problem they face by proposing
solutions to it, while scientists try to identify the
appropriate law or theory first, then attempt to solve
the problem.
MOVIE 1 starts with MIT's Woodie Flowers describing
the role of testing from a designer's perspective. Vanderbilt's
Richard Lehrer presents the idea that planning whole
investigations is the key design challenge for science
teachers. Ed Goldman grapples with the question of whether
the Model
Parachute task was actually a design task, or a
scientific inquiry, or a blend of both. Task authenticity
is a big concern for tech ed teachers: Is designing
a model parachute, or a cardboard chair, real and relevant
to students? Are the contrlled variable experiments
that students conduct different from the approaches
of professional engineers and scientists?
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