Paul Skaggs
Chair, Industrial Design
Bringham Young University
Paul Skaggs is the Chair of the Industrial Design program at Brigham Young University. In addition to his work as a professor, he also has broad experience in product design and development consulting for a variety of industries. Skaggs received his undergraduate degree in Industrial Design from BYU and his Masters of Fine Arts in Industrial Design from Rochester Institute of Technology. His research interests are in the area of design thinking including the three cognitive modes of creative thinking, visual thinking and adaptive thinking.
Collaboration in the Zone of Proximal Development
Zone of proximal development (ZPD) is defined as the space between what a learner can do without help—and where the learner needs support. Giving learners rigorous tasks they can do only with support from peers or mentors leads to the greatest learning gains.
Paul Skaggs will discuss ZPD in terms of collaborative design projects where collaborative mentors use a student-created artifact to pull a learner to a series of “need to know” places, which indicate the edge of the learner’s independent ability—or ZPD.
