'...we're not designing for a specific user at key stage 3'. Teachers' lack of planning of user-centred tasks in Design and Technology at key stage 3 in England and implication this has for pupils’ understanding of complex design tasks

This paper discusses the importance of user-centred design by outlining its history , embodiment in national and international standards (for example, British Standards Institute, 2005) and its relevance in addressing the needs of an ageing population. It also outlines how a user-centred approach to design and technology has been part National Curriculum in England since 1989. Using data collected from two schools which includes, teacher interviews (n=4); pupil focus group interviews (12 pupils comprising 6 boys and 6 girls from two schools); a pupils survey (n=50) and departmental documents such as schemes of work, we found that many of the tasks teachers plan for students, do not provide them with the opportunities that allow for a user-centred approach. We discuss the implications of this and make some initial conclusions as part of our on-going research

Designer-orientated user research methods

Designer-orientated user research method

Probability of belonging to treatment N-I (P_s) versus Soil moisture values (correlation value = −0.89, High moisture means less probability of stress).

<p>Soil moisture is given as percentage soil water content v/v. Classification accuracy for this particular set of training and testing data was 98.6% as given by GPC.</p

Comparison of average classification results of different classifiers without using light intensity scaling feature ().

<p>Comparison of average classification results of different classifiers without using light intensity scaling feature ().</p

Sampling layout for the collection of thermal images and soil moisture measurements, 2010.

<p>The rows represent beds of Spinach (cv. Racoon), with those marked in green showing irrigated sample rows and the red indicating non-irrigated sample rows. Point measurements were made every 20 m for the full length of each bed (n = 54 for each treatment).</p

Figure 8

<p>(a) The ground truth pattern for mixed condition mosaicked image. Black colour represents image region corresponding to treatment I and white colour represents the image region which corresponds to treatment N-I. (b) & (c) show classification results obtained using combined classifier with thermal only and proposed feature set respectively.</p

Image(s) obtained using a thermal imaging camera (NEC Thermo TracerTH9100 Pro).

<p>(a) thermal image with pixel values ranging from 0–255. (b) Region (rectangle) corresponding to the thermal image in the visible light image. (c) corresponding temperature range.</p

Component Matrix^a from Principle Component Analysis when both irrigated and non-irrigated spinach crops were measured for their thermal properties (maximum, minimum and range of temperatures) and soil moisture.

<p>Component Matrix^a from Principle Component Analysis when both irrigated and non-irrigated spinach crops were measured for their thermal properties (maximum, minimum and range of temperatures) and soil moisture.</p

Total variance explained by Principle Component Analysis when both well-watered and droughted spinach crops were measured for their thermal properties (maximum, minimum and range of temperatures) and soil moisture.

<p>Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis.</p

GPC classification result in terms of confidence score (C_s).

<p>Bright shade represents high confidence in classification results and dark shade represents low confidence in the classification. The classifier has higher confidence in the region with image from treatment I or treatment N-I, however the confidence value is low, as depicted by darker shade, around the boundary of two merging images from different treatments.</p