41. Visualising Student Interaction and Collaborative Design Ideation for Design Sessions with School Students

Group work is an important focus of Design and Technology (D&T) education research. In order to design effective collaborative structures facilitating divergence during design thinking sessions, we tested the effect of four group compositions on collaborative ideation. We conducted two design trials with thirty middle school students and investigated the effect of group composition on design output and communication. Under each grouping condition, the students participated either as male, female or mixed-gender groups. Along with a detailed protocol analysis of the video data, we also mapped group interactions by creating a visualisation on a linear timeline for each group. The objective of the same was to visually represent the progression of ideas and inspect collaborative ideation. These timelines helped us understand participant involvement and the nature of group interaction. A series of visual markers were created to visualise each transcript. This representation highlighted active and hesitant episodes within groups and revealed that collaboration occurred mainly in the later phase of the design thinking process. During the design process, elaboration and documentation of ideas had its effects on team collaboration.