Certain design tasks and resource pages found in DITC should be of particular interest to tech ed teachers. Those tasks include: Cardboard Chair, Shopping Bag, Nuffield's Parade Float, Pop-Up Books, and to some extent, LBD's Machines That Help and Model Parachute challenges. Visit these pages and watch the Quick Peek movies so gain an overview of them. The tech ed design task with the most detailed treatment in DITC is the Cardboard Chair challenge. You'll find its key concepts -- structures, stability, tension, compression, center of gravity - and emphasis on balancing aesthetics and structural concerns while working with limited materials skills, quite familiar.

A number of researchers and curriculum developers, whose interviews were included in DITC, talk about teaching and learning issues related to technology education. Here are some highlights:

• Hear Harvard's Phil Sadler and UK's Richard Kimbell discuss What Makes For a Good Design Challenge?
• Harvard's David Perkins and MIT's Woodie Flowers tell of ways to support students in doing more creative design work in Supporting Creativity In Kids.
• Watch the Tech Ed Video Timeline for Parachutes, especially the great follow-up discussion and lesson on Looking Versus Seeing and the Design a Toy transfer task.
• What is Design? presents different design models that have been created to give a working model of this difficult-to-describe, creative endeavor.
• In Ways of Naive Designers, review specific strategies that beginning design students use and ways of working to make them more like experienced designers.
• In Gender & Designing, hear about some surprising research on gender differences related to designing.
• Read about an activity that can help jumpstart your students in thinking as designers do in Inferring Specs.