Around the world, there are accomplished people dedicated to raising the quality of design of educational processes and materials.

ISDDE was formed to help this group work effectively as a coherent professional design and development community.

The goals of the Society are:

  • improving the design and development process
  • building a design community
  • increasing our impact on educational practice

The Fellows are designers and project leaders with outstanding records, together with some representatives from government agencies and foundations that fund such work.

New Issue of Educational Designer Published

We are pleased to announce the publication of the latest issue of ISDDE’s journal,  Educational Designer.  Issue #15 is very varied, with four articles. Marc North and Sarah Heesom have written about design of their large-scale project to promote teaching improvement in underperforming schools. Nina Sangers with Evers-Vermeul, Sanders and Hoeken studied the policies for writing in Dutch biology, geography, and history textbooks. Deborah Fields and six colleagues report on SPIKEY-20, a virtual epidemic released into a virtual world, which infected thousands of players. Good design can promote educative outcomes for public health. Amanda Strawhacker, Emily Relkin and Marina Bers investigate design of an assessment of pre-schoolers in coding a robot. The editorial team hopes this issue of journal will help us to spread ideas and good practice of educational design.

We welcome submissions of articles for Issue #16 and also the Special Issue on Justice and Belonging.  See Guidelines for authors on the journal website. https://www.educationaldesigner.org/ed/index.htm

ISDDE 2022 Conference Pre-Booking Now Open

ISDDE 2022 will be held at the University of Nottingham Conference Centre on Sept 26, 2022 (evening) through Sept 29, 2022.

Find out more at https://sites.google.com/view/isdde2022/home.

Pre-register at: https://forms.office.com/r/tcF1WNdQVi

The conference theme will be Learning 2 Design: Design 4 Learning and there will be opportunities to present your work as well as hearing from other designers. We look forward to meeting up in Nottingham.

Call for Participation

Special Issue of Educational Designer:

On Design for Justice and Belonging

Guest Editors: Leslie Dietiker, Susan McKenney, Lucy Rycroft-Smith, Christian Schunn

Improving educational outcomes of learners has long been central to the work of educational designers. However, exclusion, injustice, inequities, and inattention to diversity in learners remain a persistent challenge that has become increasingly urgent. In addition, there are many competing conceptions of social justice, belonging, equity, inclusion, and diversity that challenge the work of educational designers, and there are now also strong criticisms of the foundational research traditions (theories and methods) that underlie many educational designs. To better support educational designers, we call for papers that provide new models, insights, and guidance on design for social justice and belonging. Submissions can take the form of short articles (2000–3000 words) or long articles (5000–8000 words). Please go to Special Issue Call for Participation for more information!

ISDDE 2022 Award Announced

The Trustees of the Bell Burkhardt Daro Shell Centre Trust are pleased to announce that Sofia Tancredi has been chosen as recipient of the 2022 Bell Burkhardt Daro Shell Centre Award for Aspiring Educational Designers in Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics. Sofia’s promise as a designer, shown, in particular, by her designs integrating sensory-seeking actions as a fundamental part of regular classroom mathematics learning, impressed the Awards Committee greatly, and they see considerable potential in her approach for supporting marginalized students. Congratulations to Sofia on her $1000 prize. For details of her work, please see https://edrl.berkeley.edu/projects/balance-board-math/

Issue #14 of Educational Designer released!

Issue #14 of the electronic, open-access ISDDE journal “Educational Designer” has just been published. It can be accessed directly at the home page Educational Designer.

The articles in this issue each focus on a design challenge. Harouna Ba and Dor Abrahamson discuss the designers’ dilemma of how much freedom to allow students to initiate and define their own tasks by comparing two movement-based STEM learning activities. Martin Johnson, Rachael Horsman and Darren Macy outline the design process they used to create a framework of mathematics content which can be used by educators in emergency contexts where learners are forcibly displaced by conflict or disaster. Yu-Ping Chang, Fou-Lai Lin and Kai-Lin Yang are leaders of Taiwan’s Just Do Math project, a wide-reaching teacher professional development initiative using a multi-layered and multi-stage cascade model. They describe designing the professional development for those leaders who will help very large numbers of teachers embed the new principles into regular classrooms.

“Educational Designer” welcomes contributions related to the design of educational programs, products. systems and services. Details of the range of contributions that are welcome appear on the journal home page.

Kaye Stacey

Editor-in-Chief

Educational Designer
E-journal of the International Society for Design and Development in Education

2020 ISDDE Prize

The International Society for Design and Development in Education (ISDDE) has awarded the prestigious Prize for Excellence in Educational Design to the value of $5,000 to Joseph Krajcik , Lappan-Phillips Professor of Science Education at Michigan State University, USA.  Professor Krajcik is an expert designer of instructional materials. He leads the CREATE for STEM Institute, a joint institute between the College of Natural Science and the College of Education at Michigan State and has been a pioneering leader in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education for decades with his impact acknowledged globally

The 2020 Prize was presented to Professor Krajcik at ISDDE’s virtual conference in March 2021. Details about this unique event can be found here,

ISDDE gratefully acknowledges the Bell Burkhardt Daro Shell Centre Trust which funds the award.

Virtual Conference – March 24, 2021

ISDDE (the International Society for Design and Development in Education) held their first online international day conference on Wednesday March 24th, 2021. It was a great success! It:
  • was hosted in three phases across 24 hours with contributions from Far East, Europe/Africa and Americas time zones;
  • included the presentation of the prestigious ISDDE Prize for excellence in design for education in mathematics, science or technology for 2020;
  • included plenaries, interviews, panels and discussions;
  • and focused on design in mathematics and science of curricula, resources, assessment, professional learning, teaching and learning with technology.

Publication of Educational Designer #13

The latest issue of Educational Designer, the journal of ISDDE, is now available at https://www.educationaldesigner.org/ed/volume4/issue13/.

In this issue, the authors describe, explain, demonstrate and reflect on practical design strategies that they have used in curriculum development, from primary school to adult learners. Koeno Gravemeijer discusses educational modelling through five case studies of the creation of instructional materials. The next article is especially relevant while Education is being so heavily impacted by COVID19, Erin Gibson and colleagues  exemplify and evaluate the design strategies used to transform in-person education materials for health professional for remote use.

Kevin Reins describes his experiences over a decade using modified lesson study with pre-service teacher education students. Finally, Hugh Burkhardt and Daniel Pead provide a sweeping taxonomy of 30 design strategies and tactics that have proved effective for curriculum material development at the Shell Centre of Mathematical Education. Strategies are described and linked to illustrative examples.

We thank the authors, the editorial team and anonymous reviewers for their hard work. After five years, Dr Sheila Evans, is stepping down from being our Assistant Editor. We especially thank Sheila for all her work and we wish her well for the future. Expressions of interest for the Assistant Editor are now being called for. Please contact Kaye Stacey at   if you may be interested.

Kaye Stacey
Editor in Chief

Educational Designer

Educational Designer 12 – March 2019

This issue contains four contributions related to the third goal of ISDDE: to increase increasing our impact on educational practice.

Hugh Burkhardt has analysed the problem of making impact and the reasons for it. Moreover, he has developed a model to present to policy makers and their advisors to alleviate it.

Zalman Usiskin’s 2017 ISDDE Lifetime Achievement Award recognised the substantial impact that his work has had on practice. His paper intertwines themes of the beauty and deep interconnections in mathematics with serendipity in his long career.

Berenice Michels and Harrie Eijkelhof describe the creation of ‘Nature, Life and Technology’ an interdisciplinary STEM upper secondary subject in Netherlands. They discuss the substantive and procedural principles used during the design and development, and reflect on their success.

Tobin White, Corey Brady, Jason Huang & Michael Stevens are designing tools to support student participation in mathematically rich collaborative activities. They describe three variations of their ‘Distributed by Design’ approach, distributing mathematical objects, or representational views, or mathematical tools which students must coordinate to complete a shared task.

If you would like to contribute to a future Educational Designer please start by reading the guide to contributors – then feel free to contact the editors for further advice.

Read Educational Designer

2019 ISDDE Conference: Pittsburgh PA USA

The conference theme, Design for the Future, highlighted the new emerging challenges in STEM educational design, connecting to Pittsburgh’s long-standing focus on technology and education.

Continuing traditions set by previous conferences, the meeting was intimate and highly participatory by design. Attendees, top educational STEM designers from throughout the world, enjoyed inspirational plenary talks, presentations/poster showcases focusing on new educational designs or special challenges to educational design, small group work sessions on pressing problems of practice, and many meals and informal conversations over food and drink; this was not your usual conference in format or focus. The conference took place at the University of Pittsburgh in the emerging phoenix of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Visit the Conference Website