Building an e-PBL Platform for the Collaborative Design in Capstone Project

摘要

Capstone project is an important subject that every graduate needs to learn and experience, whose goal is to train students to be able to apply the required knowledge and skill to collaboratively complete the assigned work. The traditional PBL strategy cannot effectively enhance the students' collaborative design abilities without utilizing domain knowledge and previous user experience. In this paper, we develop a spiral e-PBL platform using enhanced CBR (e-CBR) to be able to assist students to brainstorm and design collaboratively. Therefore, the students can inquire similar cases, stimulate creative idea, build consensus, and design in each spiral design activity collaboratively. For retrieving the similar cases in this platform, the similarity functions and similarity-based case retrieval algorithm have been designed according to the project characteristic and the team profile. Then, the case-design portfolio of retrieving similar cases can then be collected and analyzed by our proposed learning scaffolding generation algorithm. The results can be used as the scaffoldings of students' collaborative design and to assist teachers monitor the students' design process and achievements. An experiment has also been done to evaluate the effectiveness of our e-PBL platform. The experimental result shows that the given appropriate learning scaffoldings can guide students to improve the design and problem solving abilities.