Learning By Design™ has Launcher units to introduce students to the culture of doing science-oriented design work. It's content units include Vehicles In Motion, Machines That Help, and Tunneling Across Georgia. LBD™ supports learning science by offering motivating tasks like design, where the need for doing investigations to inform design decisions is central, and the temporary failure of a design promotes a need to know. Students do experiments to develop rules-of-thumb that link students' design work with science and engineering laws and principles.

The Learning By Design curriculum encourages students to vary some design features and not others. LBD uses constrained design tasks so that students can focus on design decisions that are related to the concepts being targeted by the curriculum, and so that students don't get overwhelmed with making too many choices. In the end, as teacher, you choose to follow their recommendations or not. For instance, in LBD, students are given paper coffee filters for making the canopy -- students do not choose what materials to use for their chutes. A partially constrained variable in LBD's parachute task is the load -- students use choose how many washers they will use, but they do not choose washers or some other object as a load.

Kolodner's major research has been around thinking and learning through examples or "cases," or she calls "case-based reasoning". Such reasoning is helpful when working on design challenges. Collaboration is supported through a number of LBD Rituals. These include students regularly share ideas and data with others and recording them in Design Diaries.