Design Buddy: Providing Feedback for Sketched Multi-Modal Causal Explanations

An important problem for engineering students is learning how to communicate. Based on collaborations with engineering design instructors, we are creating a system, Design Buddy, that is intended to help students learn how to explain their designs. The input is a sketched comic strip with graphical annotations that indicate forces and motions, plus a structured language system that enables students to enter causal models. The system provides feedback by comparing their explanation to its own reasoning about how the design might work, using qualitative reasoning to detect contradictions and gaps in the causal explanation. This paper focuses on a structured language system to provide information that is not easily communicated via sketching, and the new technique of Sequential Explanation Analysis to provide feedback based on the consistency of a student’s explanation, both internally and with physical laws. Results from a pull-out study with engineering design students indicating that the system can indeed help them improve their explanations are also described.