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The rising waves of Industry 4.0, Sustainable Development Goals and COVID-19 have resulted in repercussions that have challenged the status quo. In preparation, Action Design Research (ADR) was used in Engineering Education as an adaptive mechanism. This research paper follows a 5-year development journey of a Business Engineering course at a South African university. The paper discusses the adaptations and refinements in response to the waves above and how they were integrated in the content, presentation and assessments of the course. Furthermore, this paper extracts generalizable findings for Engineering Education and reflects on the design of the next cycle of the course in anticipation of further waves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on mathematical equivalence, and to some extent, on number structure in early grade mathematics, has shown that most students at primary and secondary levels understand these concepts instrumentally rather than relationally. The study reported in this paper uses a design research approach to explore both mathematical equivalence and number structure in a primary pre-service teacher education programme at a university in South Africa and reports on an intervention strategy intended to culminate in developing design principles comprising guidelines for the effective teaching of number structure and mathematics equivalence in primary pre-service teacher education programmes. The mixed method study comprises 70 first-year primary pre-service teachers (PSTs) and a teacher educator. The PSTs wrote pre- and post-tests, and were interviewed following the pre-test. Skemp's notion of relational and instrumental understanding guided the design of the intervention and the analysis of the data. The results from the study indicates that PSTs' understanding of the notion of equivalence is similar to what has been reported for students in schools, and that there were some learning gains in the post-test results. Based on the findings from the study in general, some emergent design principles are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Design thinking has been widely embraced as an approach that fosters discussion and facilitates innovations that promote inclusion and empowerment in the public and private sectors. However, recent concerns have been expressed over its limited application and the exaggerated claims of its impacts when addressing wicked problems (WPs). A central challenge is comprehending how to support the process of simultaneously understanding WPs and acknowledging their uncertainty and risk. Through an action research project (aimed to help reduce youth unemployment by involving marginalized youths in service development in South Africa), this paper investigates the use of the Mess Mapping™ tool for collectively understanding, visualizing and aiding in decision-making related to the complexities of socially-oriented design research. We demonstrate that through a 'co-documenting, co-discovering and co-defining' process, it is possible to identify and understand the challenges and complexities that designers may encounter when informing future design research on WPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]