Rajinder Santos  Design Thinking for Innovation   Final Assignment    Challenge and Selection

My challenge as a middle school coding and a robotics teacher is my district’s goal to

design and implement curriculum that enables students to cultivate solutions to authentic  problems.  As a district, we try to stray away from “busy work” and develop curriculum that is  meaningful in the real world.  I am passionate about design thinking and do my best to foster a  classroom environment that encourages purposeful experimentation and reflection. Fortunately  for me, the nature of my content area allows for a culture of making tinkering. This course  offered a variety of tools to implement in the design thinking process, however the concept of  “storytelling” had a direct connection to my own practice. As expressed  in the video  “Storytelling Tool” (0:57), “storytelling is the difference between solving a problem and creating  a cause.”  Much of the success attributed to the design thinking process is centered on empathy  and authentically understanding the needs of consumers.  As I am currently working on a  project that requires students  to design a product that serves an authentic need, I found  storytelling to be an effective tool in motivating my students and igniting their creativity for this  project.     Application

I carried out this application by bridging design thinking to an innovation project that I

am working on with my  seventh and eighth grade students. ​In groups of 3 and 4, students use a  GrovePi and Raspberry Pi to create a physical prototype of a product  that serves a need of their  choice.  A Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that can run various software, whereas a  GrovePi is an electronics board that can connect to various sensors or inputs. Each group is  given a variety of inputs and sensors including LED lights, LCD displays, buttons, buzzers, light  sensors, sounds sensors, distance sensors, and temperature and humidity sensors. While each  group receives the same materials, it is up to them to decide what kind of product they will  develop and what need it will serve. Students then create a physical enclosure of their prototype.  They also create a brochure, website, or flyer which they present to an audience as they pitch  their product.​ Throughout this entire process, students document their progress in an  engineering design notebook.  As you may now see, this project has several components, but all  must connect to one driving propose - the need that their product will serve. Hence, practicing  design thinking is crucial in carrying out this project.

I find that students are often overwhelmed by the idea that they will be creating a

product that serves an authentic need.  The final product is a long term goal and is often hard to  imagine at the beginning stages of the process.  Hence, applying storytelling to this process helps  students ease into where they should begin. Storytelling works to create an emotional  connection and highlights the importance of understanding the needs of a target audience.  It is  through intense research that students choose a cause they want to work towards. Hence,

understanding the causes behind why some of the most successful products were made can  inspire students and help generate creativity. Specifically, I will  share stories from well known  companies that created common products such as the Swiffer and Pull-Ups by Huggies.  Hearing  the stories of how and why these products were developed helps students empathize with the  target audience. Empathy is so deeply rooted and design thinking and it begins with storytelling.       Insight and Approach

Scheduling is very structured in my district.  I would have liked to spend more time on

teaching students about how to apply design thinking in various projects.  I think that it would  be valuable to create common language centered around design thinking.  While this project was  time consuming, the projects that students produced demonstrated authentic learning and their  use of the design process was evident. I found that by commencing this project with sharing  stories from other companies, students  made sure to empathize with the intended user of their  own prototypes.  When they presented their products, I found that they articulated why the  created what they did.  One prototype that students created was called “Who Let the Dogs Out”,  a dog walking alert system that used a distance sensor to detect when a dog was by the door and  then set off a buzzer and an LCD screen that displays the message “Take Me Out” to the owner.  Another product was called “The Clothing Scrambler”, a device that uses a temperature sensor  to offer appropriate outfit selection based on current weather conditions.

Creativity was very evident in their products and I think that storytelling did help with

developing empathy in this project.  However, I would like to do more work centered on  understanding consumers using other tools such as mind-mapping. Moving forward, I hope to  encourage teachers in core academic classes to design lessons that incorporate design thinking.  There is great transfer value in design thinking and if students gain exposure in multiple classes,  it will naturally influence how they approach their own learning.

