Unlocking students’ creative potential in designing technological-enriched design solutions

Abstract

Creativity is an important competency for talents in the twenty first century. The study examines how integrating real-world community service challenges into the secondary school STEM curriculum impacts students’ creativity and STEM content knowledge. A total of 123 secondary school students learned the challenges faced by people with visual impairments and applied their STEM knowledge to design creative solutions. Students proposed diversified solutions, which were of three themes: safety, recreation, and convenience. The quality of the solutions indicated that the higher-performing groups outperformed the medium-performing and lower-performing groups in originality. The lower-performing groups needed further support on all dimensions, especially technical knowledge and skills, which measures proficiency in using integrated knowledge to realize designs.