The Alligator Learning Experience: Children's Strategies and Approaches to a Design Program

The Alligator Learning Experience was a pilot study conducted in order to shed light upon children's approaches to design problems. The sole portion of the original study that is reproduced in this collection is the description of methods employed and analysis of the drawings themselves. For reasons of clarity and brevity we have chosen to delete the major (and perhaps most interesting) portions of this study. These deleted portions treated more speculative questions including the notion of the child as a model for certain exemplary features of design behavior and the possible uses of phenomenological analysis and experiential psychology as tools in the education of designers. In lieu of these sections a brief and thoroughly inadequate resume of these issues can be viewed in the last half of this paper. The interested reader can obtain a copy of the original working paper entitled: 12. Phenomenological and Experiential Approach to Design Education: The Alligator Learning Experience by writing to The Center for Environmental Research, Department of Architecture, University of Oregon.