The Mindcard Concept: Increasing Interaction in Small Group Learning Settings
Year: 2014
Editor: Erik Bohemia, Arthur Eger, Wouter Eggink, Ahmed Kovacevic, Brian Parkinson, Wessel Wits
Author: Mussgnug, Moritz; Bo, Stefan
Series: E&PDE
Institution: ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Section: Learning Spaces
Page(s): 190-196
ISBN: 978-1-904670-56-8
Abstract
Learning and teaching in small groups of students with less than ten participants is a common setting in engineering design education at ETH Zurich. It can vary from class teaching and coaching sessions to study groups and project work. All learning settings usually include a platform like a whiteboard for the visualization of content and information exchange. To complement this visualization, we add magnetically attachable stiff cards (Mindcards) to the whiteboard figure of drawings and text. One can write and draw on Mindcards with common whiteboard markers. By enabling to shift the cards easily and freely, the Mindcard Concept allows to rearrange and modify the evolving whiteboard figure continuously without the effort for erasing and rewriting.
We introduce the Mindcard Concept as well as the respective physical tool and environment, and give three exemplary use cases for the concept: (1) modelling function structures, (2) structure trees, and (3) planning and organization activities. The study of teaching and learning settings for small groups of students lead to our major hypothesis: The Mindcard concept lowers the barriers of modifying and further developing whiteboard figures and this leads to increased interaction between the students and the teaching staff. Furthermore this induces an increased number of iterations of the overall whiteboard figure and also the acceleration of iteration cycles.
Keywords: Design education, visualization, Mindcard Concept, learning setting, interaction, iteration