A Note on In-Lecture Discussions

I gave a lecture on different ways of modelling where I asked the students to discuss with neighbors which role each of 6 ways of modelling might play in the design process, what they show, and what they hide. The goal was to explain that each does in fact highlight and leave out different aspects, so you should use as many of them as possible, and keep using different modelling methods throughout the project.

But they were at a point in their design projects where it was hard for them to understand the relevance of this, I think, so weren’t curious to know.

But also, for these in-lecture discussions to work, perhaps there needs to be a right answer. It helps when they can try to get it right, and then find out whether they did.

So not “discuss what a good problem statement looks like”, but “each of these three problem statements is good in one way, and bad in another way’. Find what is good and bad about each statement”.