Contextual Background
Within my specialist area, ‘Wearable Tech’ (see introduction blog post), the biggest initial hurdle is the scale of foundational knowledge as Wearable Tech consists of a combination of programming, electronics and physical computing. My role requires me to condense three separate vocations into a small period of learning, but where do you begin?
Evaluation
Currently within wearable tech I offer a range of different learning opportunities and resources for my students. These include a series of workshops exploring different interest areas, such as example projects, industry use cases, workshops & guides (supplementary materials), additional guides (Such as setting up common hardware), hand-picked external resources, useful tools & interesting practitioners (Hall, 2024). The role of these teaching materials is to support student’s decision to commit; see the sort of outcome they could produce but also supply useful starting points. To-date the main aim of these workshops and supplied learning resources has been to reduce friction, to avoid putting students off learning a complex area.
An example is predicting types of projects students would like and creating relevant guides. Throughout my PgCert I have been questioning the challenges students face with learning and have come to a crossroad. Asking myself is this really the right approach? By designing simplified learning resources, am I as an educator sheltering my students from the reality of the complexities they will face when creating projects and therefor stopping the development of the problem solving required to achieve their desired outcomes –more importantly develop skills that can be applied in the real world.
Within the paper Implementing Technology Education Problem-Solving Activities (DeLuca, 1991) I particularly like the following quote:
“…there is a difference between the product and the process when considering the value of problem-solving activities. Perkins (1986, p. 7) cautions against focusing on the products we produce and only indirectly the process by which we produce them.”(DeLuca, 1991, p.1).
This reflects my oversight in prioritising impressive final outcomes to inspire students with wearable tech’s potential, inadvertently side-lining the essential skills needed for success. Reflecting on this, student engagement issues discussed in other case studies led me to deviate too far from my original goal of teaching valuable technical skills.
Moving Forward
Moving forward I would like to focus on implementing debugging skills into the core teaching – arguably the most important skill within the area; “Troubleshooting/Debugging: Isolate the problem, identify possible cause, test, implement solution, test solution”(DeLuca, 1991, p.2).
Currently my workshop structure consists of: 1. Foundational Knowledge, 2. Reinforcing that knowledge through practical activity (See Figure 1). However, that activity is laid out in an almost infallible way, with most, if not all information required being presented. Moving forward I would like to begin experimenting with replacing my linear workshops with a circular approach (See Figure 2) that instead breaks the knowledge into smaller pieces, allowing for ‘1. Ingestion of the foundational knowledge, 2. Reinforcing that knowledge through practical activity’ – But then going further with ‘3. Testing that knowledge for practical problem solving’ – A form of reinforcement learning or problem-based learning (Hemker, Prescher and Narciss, 2017).
Practical problem solving is already in place, however, I believe through the imposing of common example problems, students will be able to test the knowledge they have learned and apply it in a way that will reinforce learning. I look forward to seeing how this implementation of reinforcement/problem-based learning could improve the self-efficiency of my students – empowering them to tackle projects in the future.
Bibliography
DeLuca, V. W. (1991) ‘Implementing Technology Education Problem-Solving Activities’, JTE, 2(2). doi: 10.21061/jte.v2i2.a.2.
Hall, E. (2024) Wearable Tech & Physical Computing. University of the Arts London. Available at: https://wt.lcfdll.com (Accessed: 15 March 2024).
Hemker, L., Prescher, C. and Narciss, S. (2017) ‘Design and Evaluation of a Problem-Based Learning Environment for Teacher Training’, Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning, 11(2). doi: 10.7771/1541-5015.1676.
Image Index
Figure 1. Hall, E. (2024) Linear Approach
Figure 2. Hall, E. (2024) Circular Approach