Design replay: Reconstruction of students' engineering design processes from Energy3D logs

One of the useful features of our Energy3D software is the ability to record the entire design process of a student behind the scenes. We call the reconstruction of a design process from fine-grained process data design replay.

Design replay is not a screencast technology. The main difference is that it records a sequence of CAD models, not in any video format such as MP4. This sequence is played back in the original CAD tool that generated it, not in a video player. As such, every snapshot model is fully functional and editable. For instance, a viewer can pause the replay and click on the user interface of the CAD tool to obtain or visualize more information, if necessary. In this sense, design replay can provide far richer information than screencast (which records as much information as the pixels in the recording screen permit).

Design replay provides a convenient method for researchers and teachers to quickly look into students' design work. It compresses hours of student work into minutes of replay without losing any important information for analyses. Furthermore, the reconstructed sequence of design can be post-processed in many ways to extract additional information that may shed light on student learning, as we can use any model in the recorded sequence to calculate any of its properties.

The three videos embedded in this post show the design replays of three students' work from a classroom study that we just completed yesterday in a Massachusetts high school. Sixty-seven students spent approximately two weeks designing zero-energy houses -- a zero-energy house is a highly energy-efficient house that consumes net zero (or even negative) energy over a year due to its use of passive and active solar technologies to conserve and generate energy. These videos may give you a clue how these three students solved the design challenge.