Talk:General Engineering Introduction/Notebooks/Project Writing

Notebook writing in evolves in four year institutions where students read each others notebooks to figure out what was done previously. This never has a chance to work at community colleges, so something else had to evolve.

Originally, the triplet of Going to do, Doing and Analysis was tried in the scientific style of hypothesis, procedure, ... conclusion. This totally crippled freshman. They would spend an entire class period just listing materials. They would try to identify all the procedures before hand like the lab manuals they were use to following. This was painful to watch. Not much engineering was done.

The Problem, Solutions and Testing triplet evolved out of the missing "something else" in student writing. Most students want to record only problem/solution pairs like they read about on the internet when trying to solve their own problems. The engineering part of this is lost. Reflective writing out of the service learning community was tried, but then students only write about their opinions and feelings. A category of "frustration" writing was created but this led to emoting again. Clearly the goal is to define problems and then multiple solutions and test them.