Research Paper on:
Teaching Design: Taking the First Steps

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is valuable for educators to teach students how to think as if they were designers, and relates the process of teaching technology education through design as a definitive methodology for  science and technology. Warner then presents the views of a number of researchers, including Petroski, who believe that children have the inherent capability to think as engineers and  designers of technology, and that this comes from the way in which early play represents a process of design. Developing these skills in young people is a valuable part  of school-based technology education. One of the challenges, Warner argues, is that formalized or traditional educational models do not always work towards the fostering of these abilities and may  actually result in the opposite, the forgetting of these processes that are involved in design. Warner (2003) argues: "The very nature of the thinking processes involved in design  may run contrary to the more traditional thinking structures encouraged in most school curricula" (p. 8). At the same time, the structures of design focus may be valuable to  the learning process. Warner states that designers must look at the total picture and all of the pieces to that picture and provide a means by which these can  be brought together. The process involved with technological design, then, is systematic, creative and iterative, and recognizes the many possible solutions for each problem. Warner recognizes  that there are differences in the way learners think, depending on what part of their brain has been fostered. Left hemisphere "thinkers" tend to process creative information differently than right  hemisphere "sensor/behavers." Technology educators, then, must seek out methodologies for expanding the creative development of varied learner populations. The curricular impacts of this study relate to what