IntroductionComplex systems are prevalent in many scientific and engineering disciplines, which makes system thinking important for students of these fields. Duchifat 3 is a unique engineering educational extracurricular program, where high school students designed, assembled, and tested a nano-satellite.MethodsThis study applied qualitative methods to explore how the participants’ systems-thinking developed during the program. Participants were interviewed using the repertory grid interview, and a semi structured interview at the beginning and at the end of the project, while various observations were conducted throughout.ResultsWhile the participants were initially assigned narrow roles, each dealing with a single sub-system of the satellite, some chose to be involved with other sub-systems and aspects of the project. Our findings show that the broader the participants’ involvement was, the greater the progress they experienced in their systems-thinking. Participants who stayed focused on a single subsystem did not show progress, while participants who involved themselves with several sub-systems exhibited a more meaningful progress.DiscussionAlthough the program design aimed to assign students to a narrow role to enable them to achieve the educational goals, from the perspective of systems-thinking this was counterproductive. These findings shed light on the design of engineering programs such as the one examined here in terms of systems-thinking development. We discuss the implications of the findings for similar programs and make suggestions for improvement.

This article presents a model for the development of an environmentally oriented unit designed to be implemented as an integral part of the science core curriculum. The program's main goal is encouraging students at the junior high-school level to develop systems-thinking and environmental insight as a basis for environmental literacy. A designbased research was employed in order to construct the learning program and improve it in consecutive cycles. The findings indicate that junior high school students who were involved in the learning process -through knowledge integration activities, scientific inquiry, and outdoor learning -achieved a meaningful improvement of their cyclic and systemic understanding of the water cycle. The article concludes with a summary of the program's design elements we recommend using in other programs seeking to foster students' understanding of natural cycles within the context of their influence on people's daily lives, rather than in the isolation of their specific scientific domains. It is suggested that an environmentally based science curriculum should involve authentic, real environmental topics, and at the same time, it should emphasize the role of scientific knowledge and skills that are needed for the development of environmental literacy

No abstract

No abstract