This study investigated the impact of participating in a year-long digital-fabrication course on high-school seniors’ problem-solving skills, with a focus on problems involving mechanistic systems. The research questions centered on whether working in a makerspace impacted students’ abilities to solve such problems and whether the process data generated during problem-solving activities could be used to identify the different problem-solving approaches taken by the participants. A novel set of hands-on, mechanistic problems were created to answer these questions, and the results showed that after taking part in the course students performed significantly better on these problems, with the post-course students making more progress towards the solutions than the pre-course students. The process data revealed two distinct problem-solving approaches for each problem, one adopted primarily by experts (the expert approach) and one by pre-course students (the novice approach). The post-course students were more likely to adopt the expert approaches, which were strongly associated with better performance on each problem. The study found that participation in the course made the high-school students better able to “see” the various components and their ways of interacting, making them more like expert engineers.

这项研究调查了参加为期一年的数字制造课程对高中生解决问题技能的影响，重点是涉及机械系统的问题。研究问题集中在创客空间中的工作是否会影响学生解决此类问题的能力，以及解决问题活动期间生成的过程数据是否可以用于识别参与者所采取的不同问题解决方法。创建了一套新颖的动手机械问题来回答这些问题，结果表明，参加课程后，学生在这些问题上的表现明显更好，课程后的学生在解决方案方面取得的进展比普通学生更大。预科学生。过程数据揭示了每个问题的两种不同的问题解决方法，一种主要由专家采用（专家方法），另一种由预科学生采用（新手方法）。课后学生更有可能采用专家方法，这与每个问题的更好表现密切相关。研究发现，参与课程使高中生能够更好地“看到”各种组件及其交互方式，使他们更像专家工程师。