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The Design Compass, a newly developed software program for supporting students designing and metacognition during designing, runs on the LabView™ platform. The Compass page (left) displays a clickable engineering design process model (see Massachusetts frameworks), means for entering short text-based descriptions and digital snapshots of sketches or prototypes, and clocks to note time spent on each design step. The Log page (see right) provides a chronological list of steps taken. Students can view, edit and append this record of their design work or see aggregated data via a histogram of a single design session or work on an entire design project.

The Design Compass was developed through a collaboration between Dr. David Crismond (City College of New York) and Dr. Morgan Hynes and Dr. Ethan Danahy (both of Tufts University’s Center for Engineering Education and Outreach).

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0835949.

Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).