What Makes Design a Good Context for Inquiry?

There are several reasons why design problems are good opportunities for student inquiry:

• Design problems are often tied to real-world problems. Students may have knowledge or experience from outside of school that they can relate to the task.
• Design problems are typically ill-defined or open-ended. Students have to make decisions about what kinds of materials to use, how they will test their design, and how they will build their design. The process of resolving and justifying these decisions often results in student experimentation.
• Building and testing designs results in data - data that students can use to reason about which design is better. Being able to use evidence to support scientific explanations is an important aspect of inquiry.
• Design is iterative. This means that each design cycle can provide information that students can use to improve their design. To take advantage of these iterations, students often create experiments to test how different designs work, with the awareness that they will be able to take advantage of what they learn in the next design cycle.
• Design problems offer a context for scientific communication. Students who are working on different solutions to the same design problem can learn from others' ideas, not just their own.

Not all design problems possess all five of these characteristics, and design can create obstacles to student inquiry. However, design problems that fit these descriptions are design problems that are well suited to students learning through inquiry.