Studying How Digital Logic Instructors Solve Canonical Problems

Sketches and other forms of graphical communication are central to both the practice and learning of engineering. Visual representations play a critical role in helping students learn engineering concepts, socialize them into the engineering discipline, and facilitate or hinder the design process. Despite the importance of graphical communication and visual representations, our understanding of how students learn these representations and use them is poor. This paper describes part of a larger expert-novice comparison study to document how sketches moderate engineering problem solving. We present preliminary findings on how digital logic instructors use sketches to solve canonical problems.