ABSTRACT
Designing systems that foster significant inquiry, enable meaningful artifact construction, and encourage useful interaction is fundamental to the field of learning sciences. In education, these types of environments have a substantial history going back to Fröbel’s gifts and Montessori’s prepared environment. In this article, we put forth a design method, medium-based design, to create such systems. We do not believe that MBD is a completely new approach to designing learning environments. Rather, we believe that designers have intuitively used similar methods, and that, by describing details of medium-based design and providing guidelines that follow this approach, we are showing support and value for this approach. Although other methods are effective in designing learning environments, these have concentrated on a top-down approach, neglecting the bricoleur designer. The bricoleur style of design is different from, but not worse than, other approaches (Turkic and Papert, 1991). Our method, MBD, is a well-formed method grounded in theory that offers designers an alternative approach to designing learning environments.
