Design Collaboration in a Distributed Environment

In engineering design classes, much of the learning takes place during student team meetings; so much of the learning is hidden from the instructor. Our long-term goal is to capture team interactions in order to develop a better understanding of collaborative learning in engineering design. This paper reports on a pilot study designed to understand the effects of electronic collaboration tools on the design process of student design teams. In the study, all teams were given the same design problem to solve, but some used pencil and paper, some used a regular whiteboard, and some used a shared digital whiteboard. While our study was a pilot study, it hints that the results of the design process are essentially the same whether students are co-located or distributed. However, we observed that students verbalized their arguments more when separated. The students in the distributed setting spent longer in each design step because they spent more time explaining ideas to students in the other room