Design Theory
Our overarching design philosophy is that affordances in technological integration reveal themselves. We intend to use this principle to set up an inquiry style course, but where the goal of inquiry is replaced with the production of an artefact as the project’s final goal. The students then move towards that goal through a series of lessons designed to teach the skills necessary to produce elements of that artefact until students are able to produce the whole artefact, on their own. To do this, structurally, our plan involves using a guided mastery based pedagogy, where the production of the artefact involves the student passing through a series of planned threshold concepts, at increasing levels of complexity, aimed at teaching the necessary steps towards producing the target goal. To do this, our threshold concepts should be laid out in such a way that they represent a series of zones of proximal development at increasing levels of complexity until the production of the artefact, or goal, is the final zone of proximal development and the student is learning and producing at that level. The menu to the side provides an overview of the theoretical underpinnings that guided our research, and our projects.