One of the best qualities of the teaching job I currently have is the ongoing need for thinking about the world through different lenses. The tech changes so quickly that if one is not naturally curious it is a challenge to stay in the know about what is possible, what is almost possible, and what will be possible because the kids in my care made it possible. In many of the experiences students tackle in class it is their curiosity and imagination that bring ideas from nascent thoughts into real production, and almost always this is done by leveraging the tools in the game engine we use in class. The entire externship experience was enlightening because I got to work with the people behind the curtain and observe first hand how the process they go through is very close to the process we go through in classes, just at a slightly deeper depth and with a different production timeline.

In the externship I have served multiple roles on multiple development and design teams. From helping to create skill and standards alignment documents to helping with live technical support/troubleshooting to helping to create technical tutorials for bleeding edge tech, every part of the process has been grounded in curiosity and imagining a different kind of future. What is interesting about the process has been seeing the same kinds of questions, discussions, and techniques used to surface ideas, ideate through them, design solutions based on those refined ideas, prototyping solutions, testing, and reflecting. Regardless of the team I have been a part of or the project we were working on, some level of a Design Thinking process has been apparent, especially in the project/developer based parts of the externship.

A lot of the work of the team making the training tutorials is centered around understanding the user and drilling down into the user experience. As, Achatz and Svasta (2020) discuss, centering the entire process on the user is crucial if one is going to make something that solves the issue the user will have. That base approach to Design Thinking is all about curiosity and imagination, because one needs to be curious to determine what the end user will need in a product and solving for that end user, especially when there isn't a solution already in existence, requires both imagining that user working with/through the proposed solution and in imagining the new solution in the first place. This process has been evident on the teams I have been a part of in both the creation of user profiles and in the creation of tutorial solutions for those eventual users.

One of the other core elements of curiosity and imagination I have seen recently is in the breakout of tasks to different members of the team and then team collaboration sessions where those solutions are evaluated, adapted, and in some cases completely abandoned so that new solutions are built. There has been a wealth of opportunity to witness people coming together with different points of view, different ideas, and different methods of approaching the same problem with different kinds of creative lenses.

This has weight and importance in the classroom, because to prepare students for collaborative, creative ventures, teachers must give learners more opportunities for collaborative, creative work and support an approach to learning and content creation that intentionally includes imagination as a core pillar.

Works Cited:

Achatz, J., & Svasta, M. (2020, August 20). Design thinking. ICG. Retrieved April 17, 2022, from https://www.integratedconsulting.eu/insights/design-thinking/