Digital Intervention for Collaborative and Human-Centered Activities in Design-Based Learning Scenarios

Training science and engineering students to become responsible citizens and professionals requires novel and creative pedagogical approaches, such as design thinking. This concept relies on processes and tools to develop creativity and problem-solving skills with a human-centered mindset in learning scenarios. This article presents the implementation of a digital intervention designed to support collaboration in design thinking activities. These activities are built around the Sustainability Value Proposition Canvas. This canvas was developed to structure the collaborative design of a human-centered value proposition. Our results indicate that the students adopted a human-centered approach. We observed that contributions to the value proposition were evenly distributed within the groups. Our observations suggest that collaboration was not impaired by the usage of digital tools. They revealed that the students worked in parallel but did not build on each other’s contributions most of the time. Finally, our data shed light on a difference between the usage of two types of collaborative digital tools, a virtual canvas and a text editor. In addition to these results, we demonstrate how learning analytics can be harnessed to reconstruct and analyze design processes. This paper contributes to science and engineering education by providing new insights on teamwork activities supported by digital tools in design-based learning scenarios.