Information-and-Psychological Modeling of the Main Components of Engineering Thinking and the Ways They Are Formed

Abstract

The article focuses on an algorithm for modelling the main components of engineering thinking in the context of the convergence that the disciplines of the natural-and-mathematical cycle, computer science, information and material technologies gain. The algorithm makes it possible apply the methodological foundations of activity regulation to the practice of forming the principal components of secondary school students’ engineering culture. The procedure is based on the information approach with an emphasis on the students’ mental experience, which they acquire while solving creative engineering problems according to the TRIZ methodology. Grounded on the study worked out, it is established that the procedure of “soft” modelling, as a kind of the cognitive method of building educational models, reveals general trends in the way to form and develop high school students’ natural science-and-design thinking. The tools proposed in the article can use the obtained results when study the tasks of conceptual modelling of various aspects of human intellectual activity.

Keywords

• post-non-classical educational paradigm
• engineering/natural science/design thinking
• conceptual modelling
• information-and-psychological modelling
• educational model
• information approach
• intellectual activity
• nbics-technologies
• theory of inventive problem solving
• triz