Our students live in a world surrounded by technologies, products of engineering design. There is a process that is used to develop and refine technologies to meet needs or solve a problem. This is named the engineering design  process. As a thinking process it is similar to the writing process, where in collaboration with peers and  teachers students revise and refine their work through testing (work is read), evaluation (editing) and revision.

The engineering design processes is cyclical, and is a learning process that uses creative and critical  thinking skills to design technologies to solve a problem or fill a need. Ideas are generated that are responsive to the problem statement. One example is that in this process, it may be learned that the problem begin solved is not the right problem. So you go back to requirements. Another example could be that a prototype is developed, and at that point it is clear that the conceptual design is wrong. So the process returns to the design phase again.

For teachers as facilitators of learning, the engineering challenges are used as a generator of questions. The engineering design process is a great place to create “structured controversy” in student discourse, with the teacher modeling questions with more than one right answer.

Questions, evaluation, reflection and creativity are at the heart of the process. In each step, engineers evaluate what they are doing and communicate in drawings and words as well as in discussions, their ideas. These are then used in discourse with colleagues to present and evaluate the design solutions to the problem statement.