Reinventing invention and design

For the last five years, we have taught a course on Invention and Design which attracts students from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, as well as the School of Engineering and Applied Science. This course has been a laboratory for trying new approaches to teaching and for experimenting with new instructional technologies. In this paper, we describe how the course has evolved over five years, what we have tried and how it has worked. Through a series of active learning modules, the students experience the processes of design and invention. They also reflect on their activities and group interactions, and compare their results and processes with those of other teams. In the last few years, we have made extensive use of the World Wide Web and have incorporated multimedia into our cases and projects. We describe the cases, exercises and projects used in this class and the tools we use to foster reflection. We strive to balance doing with reflection, individual and team activities, and personal and interpersonal interactions with the use of technology