The Research of Developing and Evaluating Innovative Teaching Module for Cross Disciplinary Learning---Using Interactive Mechanical Toy Design as an Example

In the beginning of 21st century, innovation and multi-disciplinarity has becoming increasingly important. Single domain of expertise seems to be insufficient to deal with nowadays diversified society. Recently, the voices from industrial and business market has emphasized a need for graduated students with multi-disciplinarity, therefore the Ministry of Education in Taiwan has proposed a few projects toward the cultivation of multi-disciplinarity for students. For students in the field of design education, students are required to gain core capabilities in design thinking and observational reflection, etc. Besides, students are required to gain multi-disciplinary subjects in business studies, science, and engineering. The research project focuses upon investigating students’ learning motivation toward the learning of mechanism engineering and the learning outcome in related domain knowledge. The teaching method is based on experiential learning and the teaching strategy is to develop teaching aids in augmented reality and 3D RP technology. This project focuses on undergraduate students with design or art background to effectively and easily learn cross-disciplinary domain knowledge, e.g., interactive mechanical mechanisms, by means of the support of teaching aids in use of augmented reality and 3D fast prototyping technology, and the course module. Additionally, this project will adopt the idea of developing interactive mechanical toys as the design theme. The emphasis of the design theme is not merely static toys, but a lively art work that is humorous, multi-faced and funny. The theme is selected to be not only funny, but also interactive, which could enhance students’ learning motivation and to stimulate student’s learning willingness to further explore the underlying principles. Having gained the knowledge, students then complete their designs to develop a physical artifact through the approach of learning by doing. The further research after the completion of this project, the research would expand to include other contents to further enhance the learning result. The evaluation of this research will include the survey of students’ learning motivation, and assessments on students’ learning outcomes. About thirty students with the design background will be recruited in this study. Analysis of the data will be conducted with quantitative and qualitative research. Quantitative research includes the survey on motivation, and examinations before and after the teaching. Qualitative research includes survey, exam, and semi-structured observation from the instructors.

Project ID:PF10207-0400
External Project ID:NSC102-2410-H182-014