Design Thinking

With your students, utilize Design Thinking

• • Empathize - Learn about your audience for whom you are designing - Who are my users? What matters to them? If students find an emotional connection or direct relevance to their lives, they are more likely to internalize the knowledge. Intention, Amy Burvall and Dan Ryder

  • Define - Construct a point of view for the user - What are their needs?

  • Ideate - Brainstorm and come up with creative solutions - Encourage divergent ideas

  • Prototype - Build a representation of one or more of your solutions - How can I show my idea? A prototype is a rough draft and will likely require trial and error. Allow time.

  • Test - Test your idea for feedback - What worked?

  • Expect different outcomes with different groups - Give students CHOICE/CONTROL

  • Share your results with an authentic audience

• Learn/collaborate with your students

• Expect the process to be messy

• Expect failures along the way to success. It is OK to struggle.

*Source

REAL WORLD Things to consider:

• The problem must be real. It must involve an authentic challenge grounded in compelling societal, economic, and environmental issues that affect people’s lives and communities.

• Students must be able to relate to the problem. If students don’t care about the problem, their buy-in will be limited. This needs to be a significant challenge students care about. It might be a problem in their own life or community. Alternatively, you might build a context to help them connect with an unfamiliar problem by using videos, speakers, or field trips.

  • • Encourage students to come up with the problem. This approach typically generates the most enthusiasm and buy-in from students. Give them as much autonomy as possible to identify problems they want to solve, within the constraints dictated by the curriculum. You might start by asking students to be on the alert for problems in their home, school, or community. For example, students might notice erosion in the schoolyard, or determine that kids need a digital tool to manage their homework assignments. If students get stuck, ask them what needs to happen to make life better for the citizens in their area. Are some people in their community hungry? Is pollution a problem?

    • Empathy needs to be at the core, enabling students to observe and understand people better while also learning about their needs, wants, motivations, frustrations, pains, and goals.

• The problem should be “doable.” For a project to be successful, students should have access to the resources, knowledge, and skills they need to solve the problem—and the scope of the problem should be manageable. Tackling a problem involving interplanetary space travel for example could not be prototyped.

• The problem must allow for multiple acceptable approaches and solutions. Don’t even consider a problem with a single, predetermined approach and “right” or “wrong” answer. Students should use design thinking—drawing on skills and concepts—to solve the problem.

• The problem should align with grade-level standards. In a packed school day, neither teachers nor students have time for much “extra” curriculum content. Look at your standards and then look around at things students see daily.

Source - Education Week - edited for space and a more general curriculum focus