Engineering educators might be interested in innovative strategies to support student learning. We propose a creative design approach to support engineering students’ learning: visual notetaking. In this work, we designed, offered, and researched a 10-week seminar on visual notetaking for thirteen undergraduate engineering students at the University of Washington. During the seminar we engaged in weekly conversations on visual notetaking topics such as layout, color, and text hierarchy. Afterward, we interviewed nine of the thirteen enrolled students and analyzed their artifacts generated from the seminar. We report our findings in two parts: first, we describe the iterative process of designing our visual notetaking seminar; second, we present vignettes and artifacts to highlight student experiences’ in the seminar. One of our contributions to engineering education includes sharing our detailed curriculum design such that educators can promote visual notetaking practices in their contexts. Second, we encourage the engineering education community to consider how we can create opportunities for students to design their own active learning experience within traditional engineering classroom settings.
Wendy Roldan is a PhD candidate in Human Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington studying equity in engineering education. Her work draws from the fields of engineering education, design, and learning sciences.
Yuxin (Ziva) Xu is a second-year undergraduate student at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research areas of interest include reflection in engineering education, equity in engineering, and human-computer interaction.
Jennifer Turns is a Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. She is interested in all aspects of engineering education, including how to support engineering students in reflecting on experience, how to help engineering educators make effective teaching decisions, and the application of ideas from complexity science to the challenges of engineering education.
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