Capturing middle school students’ understandings of design thinking

Abstract

Design thinking is a method for solving complex problems that provides those who use it with steps and mindsets for developing innovative solutions that respond to human needs. This powerful method has made successful inroads in the corporate sector and has been gaining prominence in higher education. More recently, it has begun to gain momentum in K-12 education (Carroll et al., 2009). In 2009, the Research in Education and Design lab (REDlab) was founded at Stanford University with the mission of performing research to identify the opportunities and challenges associated with bringing design thinking to K-12 education. In its early work, REDlab held a workshop on design thinking for elementary school teachers where teachers immediately recognized the differences between traditional classroom practices and design thinking pedagogy, and were excited by its transformative potential (Research in Education Design, 2016). Several design thinking challenges for schools ensued: one K-12 teacher created a challenge around the characters of the story Cinderella; a middle school teacher gave an Antarctica-inspired design challenge to her students; and one reading teacher discovered that, after several design challenges, some of her reading students improved one year in reading level in only a few months. These early experiments with design thinking propelled the REDlab team to continue exploring the role that design thinking might play in K-12 education.