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The focus of Design and Technology (D&T) education (Wilson & Harris, 2004) has been on designing and making activities and in developing technological capabilities amongst students. Innovation is an important aspect of D&T that helps in creating new products and artefacts to overcome the limitations of existing ones. Problem solving and problem identification are inherent components of innovation and D&T education. This study aims to compare differences in problems identified by adults and children at the grassroots level in India. In particular, we ask what kind of differences are there in problems identified by adults and school students and what could be the reasons for the differences and its implications for design and technology education? The data of innovations was accessed from the website of the National Innovation Foundation (NIF), India. The innovators, both children and adults, had not received any design brief by an external agency and the range of problems identified by them were from diverse areas. We grouped the problem areas into a number of categories. Contrary to conventional wisdom and literature about children being more creative than adults, we found a greater diversity in the problems tackled by adults. More importantly there were qualitative differences in the kind of problems identified by adults and children. Interestingly a category of problems that children identified was related to human behaviour and students attempted to fix these behaviours through technology.

One of the central problems in curriculum design is to find a rational basis for the selection of subject content and the assessment of student progression. Without good reasoning, decisions about the selection of content according to various levels of complexity would be left to personal opinion of the faculty members and a reasoned debate among peers about what to choose and what to omit in a curriculum would not be possible on a logical basis. In 1956, celebrated educationist Benjamin Bloom along with his associates introduced the revolutionary Taxonomy of Educational objectives (popularly known as the Bloom's Taxonomy) as a resolution to the above problem. Since then, the Bloom's taxonomy has become the cornerstone of curriculum design across the world, particularly in the context of outcome-based education. Taxonomy of educational objectives are composed of three parts, Taxonomy of Cognitive domain, Affective domain and Psychomotor domain. However, only taxonomy of cognitive domain (popularly known as the Bloom's taxonomy) was adopted rapidly by educationists across the globe. Several Accreditation agencies require an educational program to align their curriculum to Bloom's taxonomy (cognitive domain) for ranking and grading of curriculum aspects of educational programs at school and university level. However, the graduate attributes which are outlined by educational administrations not only make cognitive aspects as part of learning objectives, but also affective and psychomotor aspects, since cognition, affective and psychomotor development complete all dimensions of a student's development process. While the theoretical basis for Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive domain can be traced to classification of knowledge structures itself, the theoretical basis for Taxonomy of affective domain is still ambiguous. It could be one of the reasons for its meagre adaptability in educational curriculum. This paper is an attempt to research for a theoretical basis for evolving taxonomy of the affective domain by tracing developments in the field of Axiology.

School science textbooks are an amalgamation of concepts collected from different fields of Science like Physics, Chemistry and Biology. The actual number of concepts in the different domains of science are enormous. Educationists have to make a decision of choosing some concept that they think are necessary for students to know at a certain age. Moreover, these concepts have to be arranged in a certain order of arrangement from first chapter to the last in a textbook. The aim of this paper is to question the ontological basis of filtering concepts from the larger world of science to placing them in a school science textbook. Through two informal studies presented in this paper, the author has tried to demonstrate that different groups of people can form concept maps of a topic that are very different in structure compared to what is given in NCERT textbook. If there are multiple ways of arranging the same set of concepts, then how do educationist validate one set of arrangement of topics against the other? The result of study puts light on the fact that currently there are no criteria available for judging the ontological validity of concepts that are present in existing textbooks in school science curriculum. The selection of topics is dependent upon limited individual knowledge base of the expert who is writing the chapter. The article briefly provides a framework by which ontology of a subject can be developed collaboratively by a community of teachers and subject matter experts. This ontology can be used as a valid guide for choosing and arranging topics in a school level science textbook.