Helping Instructors Scaffold Students’ Design of Educational Technology Projects Chris DiGiano Michael Chorost Mark Chung Jeff Huang SRI International 333 Ravenswood Avenue Menlo Park, CA, USA [chris.digiano, mark.chung, jeff.huang]@sri.com, michael@michaelchorost.com Abstract: The design of effective learning technologies is a complex and ill-structured practice that can be difficult to teach to future generations of designers. Here we discuss our development of a tool that scaffolds students’ design activity by prompting them to consider, in writing, many of the key issues that professional designers confront when planning a new project. This tool, called Gorp (“Gallery, Organizer, and Repository of Projects”), is a Web-based application used by universities across the country. Gorp has evolved to scaffold critical and often overlooked aspects of learning technology design through its organization of descriptive categories. The system is also designed to encourage students to collect feedback on their projects and iterate them through a process of testing and revision. Introduction University instructors who teach courses in learning technology design face a number of important problems that have not been well-addressed in the research to date. As Craig et. al. (2000) note, design is a complex and ill-structured domain, with few obvious and easy answers. Since the same is true for education, the problem is compounded when the topic is learning technology design. Students need considerable guidance in identifying user needs, specifying proposed designs in detail, and iterating upon them through a process of feedback and revision. It is critically necessary to provide instructors with tools that they can use to scaffold students’ work over a semester or quarter. In this paper, we describe an online tool intended to assist in such scaffolding. The tool – called the “Gallery, Organizer, and Repository of Projects”, or “Gorp” for short, was designed within the context of an NSF-funded project called Training and Resources for Assembling Interactive System, or TRAILS. (The name “Gorp” was chosen to fit in with the TRAILS metaphor, since “gorp” also means a hiking snack, that is, “Good Old Raisins and Peanuts.”) See http://trails-project.org/webapps/gorp/Gorp.do to view the GORP library. 1 Gorp was developed under the aegis of TRAILS, a multiyear, NSF-sponsored effort to broaden and support the pool of talent available to create technology for K-12 education. To TRAILS, examples of educational technology include simulations, adaptive tutorials, interactive exhibits, and educational games. Our approach focuses on engaging teams of university students in creating learning technologies through project-based design courses. TRAILS currently sponsors and supports four pilot courses across the U.S., which we hope will provide models for future learning technology design courses. Through these courses TRAILS intends to have three major effects: to better prepare tomorrow's designers of learning tools, to 1 For additional papers resulting from TRAILS courses and research, look up the other papers in this ED- MEDIA symposium: Mercier, Booker, & Goldman, “Bringing collaboration front and center in a cross- disciplinary design course"; Repenning & Clayton, "Playing a game: The ecology of designing, building and testing games as educational activities"; and Hoadley & Cox, “Educating Reflective Learner Centered Designers.”