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.