2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Providing a better method to represent structures of knowledge as they exist in the mind onto an external tool is instrumental 1) in improving learners' ability to understand and scaffold complex concepts, 2) in helping teams produce a shared understanding, and 3) in facilitating teachers’ assessment of students’ comprehension and teams’ orientations. This goal is at the heart of 12 years of research and development of a tool that began with strong theoretical foundations from cognitive sciences, learning theories, studies on experts, and design theories. Four design loops of pilot projects, analysis, communication, and redesign culminated in 2020 in the principles of Concept-Space: a visual workspace that offers fast creation and gathering of multiple types of work artifacts, real-time collaboration, and a structure of knowledge akin to concept maps, but with an additional dimension of depth where any concept can be expanded to provide an internal Concept-Space for elaboration and more specific content. Concept-Space’s hierarchical structure has successfully provided a clear central space for design projects and knowledge acquisition, organizing and connecting thousands of concepts in a manner similar to navigating a digital map, linking details with their more general concepts.

To improve the quality of collaboration and to support the design process for each individual in the team, we explore using relate.space, a web based implementation of Concept-Space, in an entrepreneurship design course and in major capstone project courses. A first experiment conducted in 2021 used a mixed-method study with surveys and a semi-guided focus group with six teachers and 26 students doing their final capstone engineering project. The results support that such a workspace could enhance design and communication qualities, particularly in helping to identify and define the project, and to establish a global, coherent, and common vision of the project. All teachers agreed or strongly agreed that the use of Concept-Space is beneficial for accessing teams’ design work and for obtaining a clear and more complete picture of all elements of the project.

This positive result led to exploring Concept-Space in a larger multi-disciplinary course (mechanical engineering, robotics, business) built around teamwork, technical and entrepreneurial design processes, and team coaching. The 2024 cohort used Concept-Space to support the entire design process of 20 teams of 10 students. The participants were surveyed with open questions about their perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of the tool.

The presentation explains the foundations used to guide the design of Concept-Space and how it supports learning and problem-solving. It navigates through the workspaces of design projects produced by students and demonstrates how the innovative time-travel retroaction layer could be leveraged for evaluation and feedback. It also provides resources for using Concept-Space in pedagogical settings.