Design Thinking
Design Thinking: Accelerating STEM with Edwin
Design thinking can help your students find creative solutions to big problems—and small ones, too. It’s a process that starts with empathy, encourages ideas, promotes failure (in a good way) and ensures user-approved solutions. If the problem isn’t quite solved after a round of design thinking, no worries. Use those new insights to start the process again. Let’s dive into design thinking!
A Collection to Introduce Design Thinking
Design thinking may seem like a daunting concept at first, but it’s easy to understand once you have a good grasp of the phases involved: empathy, define, ideate, prototype, and test. What do those terms mean? Have no fear! We created a collection in the Edwin app to cover the basics.
Take a Peek Inside the Collection
The collection kicks off with a short video to break down the design thinking process. Watch the overview video here:
The collection then breaks the process down further to get into the meat of each of the five phases (empathy, define, ideate, prototype, and test).
Each Learning Object uses concrete examples to explain the purpose of each phase and introduces techniques design thinkers might use to achieve their solution.
Keeping with the spirit of design thinking, students have opportunities to get (and give) feedback at each stage of the process. As they learn to apply their design thinking skills, they reflect on their understanding through interactive quiz questions (which provide them with instant feedback) and check-ins (which provide educators insight into individual and class readiness to move on in the process). If the feedback shows that a phase needs to be revisited, consider it successful design thinking! Design thinking, after all, is intended to be iterative. It is based on continual improvement.
Design thinking is all about “doing” so we created a custom toolkit to help students put their plans into action. They can record observations, jot down ideas, make sketches, and more!
Use Design Thinking Anywhere
Design thinking is not just for designers–it’s for everyone! Students can apply it to any problem across a range of topics, interests, and industries.
Endless Possibilities
Consider this process to help structure your next class project. For example, you might approach any of the following classroom activities using design thinking:
An Edwin STEM Story
Recently, we worked with Dufferin Peel Catholic District School Board (DPCDSB) to customize a design thinking project for students around the 2022 Olympic Winter Games. It was an informative, creative experience for everyone involved. This project was framed as a design challenge, meaning the problem was defined in advance for students.
We Needed Some Help. Enter Canadian Olympian John Fairbairn.
To help find solutions to this problem, we connected with Canadian Olympian John Fairbairn of Calgary, Alberta. He gave us the inside scoop on skeleton racing and what it’s like to compete at the Olympic level. Watch a quick interview with John.
Hearing directly from an Olympian helped students empathize with a skeleton racer’s unique needs and concerns. They were well on their way towards brainstorming solutions and designing a track.
