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The Forgetting Curve
The concept of the “forgetting curve” is that learners will forget an average of 90% of what they have learned within the first month. The temptation when learning hugely complex CAD tools is to gallop through tutorials to get to the advanced tools as quickly as possible. This means that fundamentals can be quickly forgotten, including the development of key physical capabilities, like mouse control.
This means that instructional sessions need to be planned to be spaced and to revisit prior sessions. So for example the second session learning Fusion 360 could include an introductory activity to navigate the workspace, to identify tools and features used in the first session. Once learners are secure they can move onto new content.
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Strategies:
Start your planning at the end – where do you want your learners to be / what do you want them to be able to confidently do in X weeks?
Plan for spaced learning : chunk the information over periods of time and include regular opportunities to retrieve the previously learned information in a variety of formats such as solving problems, completing quizzes, demonstrating a capability.
Offer opportunities for learners to access materials when they want it and how they need it. For example, creating a PDF may be easy to create but hard to access effectively on a mobile device or a series of looping gifs may provide the visual reinforcement that a video does not.
Have materials ready to stretch and challenge on demand - learners, particularly with CAD, will progress at astonishingly different rates so pacing needs to be individualized.
Flow
“A person is in a state of flow when they are totally immersed in a task. When a person is “in flow,” they may not notice time passing, think about why they are doing the task, or judge their efforts. Instead, they remain completely focused” (link).
Flow Theory was developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi the Hungarian-American psychologist. The theory suggests that learners can experience optimal learning when they perform tasks characterized by a skills-challenge balance and by a person's interest, control, and intense focus.
When teaching students who have been in a flow state will say things like “wow, that went quickly.” To try to facilitate a flow state activities and session need to be planned to achieve a careful balance of challenge vs skills (capability)
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The task is perceived to be too difficult students may disengage from it, while if it is too easy they may get bored and distracted. By way of an example, asking a student in the foothills of learning CAD to design a full combustion engine is certainly too ambitious, while asking an undergraduate to repeatedly create a dice may not be sufficiently challenging.
Likewise, if they do not have the skillset to access the task,or their capability is beyond the task then engagement will likely be poor.
The art of task-design therefore is to create challenges to keep the challenge increasing, matched to developing a skill set.
Strategies:
Start at the end - what do you want the students to be able to confidently do in X weeks e.g. 2D sketch using constraints, extrude (cut), chamfer, loft.
Think about the level of ambiguity in the task. A task to design a chess set will be mostly well understood and learners will likely have a strong concept of the context, whereas a task to design a new personal transportation device is highly open-ended and students will have to make high-level decisions as well as retrieving and applying their skillset.
The type and complexity of challenge will change over time as learner capability builds.
Investigate “classic” design challenges and see how you can adapt them to meet the needs of your cohort and curriculum ambitions e.g. an articulating desk lamp (but only using xyz)