Unravelling Ideas and Artefacts

Abstract This study tracks the progression of students’ ideas by understanding how ideas are adopted or rejected. Understanding the discourses that lead to idea progression could help illumine sense-making and decision-making processes within student group discussions. Student-generated artefacts in the form of vertical farming prototypes were analysed. These artefacts were from four groups of students who were engaged in an integrated STEM activity to improve existing vertical farming solutions in land-scarce Singapore. In the authors’ analysis to understand how the final prototype came to being, they examined the progression of ideas through lesson phases of envisioning, sketching, collaborative modelling, feedback, and evaluation. A coding scheme was used to track whether ideas were rejected, improved, or assimilated in the final prototype. Idea maps were generated to track key developments of ideas. The findings revealed that groups that took greater risks in generating more ideas had more rejected ideas and were also more engaged in the feedback process. This resulted in richer idea development. Idea fluency was highly varied across all four groups. This suggests that group engagement and a culture of reflection and monitoring could significantly improve idea quality, although the lack of curriculum time could limit desired divergent idea generation.