Standing On The Shoulders Of Peers: Tournament-Style Remixing In Project Courses

All design is redesign: many real-world projects directly build on others' work. By contrast, course projects usually demand the opposite: learners must use their own work from start to finish. Drawing inspiration from peer production communities, we introduce tournament-style remixing into project-based assignments. Remixing reduces learners' path dependence, enabling them to diverge from their work on early assignments. Remixing also gives learners an up-close look at other approaches to the same project. Finally, remixing provides the opportunity to practice the real-world skill of elaborating upon the work of others. We present an early pilot of remixing in a design course project and discuss implications for learning.