(Test) How to Implement Design Thinking for Educators

Developing problem-solving skills and encouraging creativity in students is a vital part of an educator’s job. However, it can sometimes be tricky to figure out the most effective and engaging ways to practice these skills. Design thinking offers a guiding structure that seamlessly merges these two skill areas. As we’ll see in more detail, there are many ways that educators can apply design thinking in the classroom to teach students how to better empathize, come up with ideas, and bring those ideas to life.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking has become integral across many design disciplines, from industrial design, to product design, to digital design. Defined by Stanford professor Jeremy Utley as “an exceptional idea-generating methodology”, design thinking offers a framework for coming up with new design ideas and ultimately solving problems—not unlike the Engineering Design Process.

In practice, design thinking comprises a set of steps, which enable designers to both come up with functional, problem-solving designs and to evaluate those designs. The five steps of design thinking are:

• Empathize
•Define
•Ideate
•Prototype
•Test

How to Implement Design Thinking

The first step involves learning about and understanding the user’s problems and needs. From there, you can define a problem to solve and then move into the third stage of ideation. In this step, think about creative ways to solve the problem through brainstorming, mind-mapping, and out-of-the-box thinking. In the prototyping step, the most promising ideas come to life through manual drafting, digital design, and even physical prototyping using technologies like 3D printing. Prototypes can then be tested, evaluated, and re-iterated until the best solution has been reached.

Design Thinking Activities for the Classroom

Design thinking can be a powerful tool for educators and students of any age can benefit from learning and applying its principles for innovative problem solving. In fact, implementing design thinking from a young age can help inspire students to think creatively and purposefully and equip them to solve the problems of tomorrow.

Here are some fun and dynamic ways to integrate design thinking at the primary, middle and high-school levels.

Design Thinking for Elementary Students

At the elementary school level, educators can encourage students to practice empathy and problem solving through storytelling. Introducing kids to different types of stories and characters opens their eyes to new points of view, and they can also start to identify problems that those characters have and think about how they could be solved. For example, many classic fairy tales feature characters that face a challenge, such as Rapunzel being stuck in her tower or Hansel and Gretel getting lost in the forest. As a fun activity, educators can invite their students to come up with ideas to solve these problems, like designing a makeshift ladder to help Rapunzel, or a more fool-proof way for Hansel and Gretel to find their way out of the forest!

Design Thinking for Middle Schoolers

Middle schoolers can dive deeper into design thinking through engaging classroom activities like the one initiated by Hall Middle School teacher Jennifer Fry. She invited her students to use Sphero’s littleBits electronic building blocks to prototype sculptures that incorporated a moving or interactive component. The catch? The activity had a time constraint and had to be completed in a single period. Adding this limit recreated the time constraints and timelines that real designers and engineers work within and encouraged students to increase their resourcefulness and streamline the design thinking process.

Design Thinking for High Schoolers

In high school, teachers can introduce students to more advanced ideation and prototyping methods. For ideation, digital tools like LucidChart and Miro can help students collaborate and brainstorm, while digital design programs, like Tinkercad, Blender and Figma, enable them to design virtual models. If your school or local library has a 3D printer, students can even bring their prototypes to life and test them. The hands-on testing process will allow them to evaluate their design, make necessary changes to the digital model and then print a new iteration, thus completing the design thinking steps.

Sphero’s Blueprint Engineering Kit is also a great tool for practicing design thinking. The kit, which includes over 320 modular components, can be used to create a variety of mechanical structures and test out engineering principles. For inspiration, Sphero’s Blueprint Engineering Challenge Cards are full of activity ideas that leverage design thinking. For example, in Challenge #4, students are tasked with identifying a need in the classroom and prototyping a solution that will help improve the learning environment.

Solving Tomorrow’s Problems

Ultimately, teaching students the design thinking steps from a young age will allow them to hone their problem solving, critical thinking, and ideation skills. Later in life, students can use these skills to address and solve real world problems in any career. Sphero’s resources for educators are a great place to get started and offer many activities and lessons that leverage design thinking and engineering principles.