Week 3 - Design thinking

Updates: Added in ‘CC by Olivia Spanswick’ to original content

Design thinking is a process that provides students with the opportunity to experiment, create and protype models, gather feedback and redesign (Razzouk and Shute, 2012). Design thinking should be implemented and be a main focus within educational settings. It encourages students to engage in productive failure (trial and error), build resilience, gain creative confidence, problem solve and collaborate (Panke, 2019).

Sphero Indi (‘Indi’) is an interactive play-based technology that provides students with the opportunity to build their own mazes using coded colour tiles (Vaden, 2021). The Indi has a built-in colour sensor that directs the robot’s movements (the direction and speed) based on the colour tile it travels across.

So, you might ask how does Indi encourage design thinking for students? Well Indi empowers students to design their own mazes, which subsequently engages them to implement problem solving and computational skills (Vaden, 2021). These skills can be seen through the student’s experimentation of different designs, creating the maze and adjusting/redesigning if they don’t initially produce the desired outcome for the maze that they first designed.

Fostering creativity

Indi fosters student’s creativity, as it is an interactive and hands-on technology. For example, Indi can be used to teach student’s different mathematics skills, such as estimating/calculating distance and creating shapes. Within the NSW mathematics syllabus this can be seen in Early Stage 1 syllabus code MAE-2DS-01 “makes two-dimensional shapes, including triangles, circles, squares and rectangles” (NESA, 2023). The practical nature of Indi increases creativity, as students engage in productive failure by trial and error. This encourages students to think more critically and enhances their problem-solving skills when engaging in learning.

CC By Olivia Spanswick

CC By Olivia Spanswick

Pedagogies

The constructivist pedagogy encourages students to engage in productive failure through trial and error and participate in self-directed learning, where they can gain experiences that allow them to explore their own ideas (Bower, 2017). This is seen in Indi, as teachers can allow the space for students to experiment with different puzzles and shapes through trial and error. Indi also involves design-based learning, as students can change and revise the tiles in their maze to better suit their desired outcome and for increased efficiency.

Limitations

A limitation of Indi is that if students are having no success of completing a maze, they can become discouraged, which may cause them to be disengaged in the learning process.

References:

Bower, M. (2017). Design of Technology-Enhanced Learning: Integrating Research and Practice. Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/9781787141827

NSW Education Standards Authority. (2023). Mathematics K–10, NSW curriculum, NSW education standards authority. https://curriculum.nsw.edu.au/learning- areas/mathematics/mathematics-k-10-2022?tab=outcomes

Panke, S. (2019). Design Thinking in Education: Perspectives, Opportunities and Challenges. Open Education Studies, 1(1), 281–306. https://doi.org/10.1515/edu-2019- 0022

Razzouk, R., and Shute, V. (2012). What Is Design Thinking and Why Is It Important? Review of Educational Research, 82(3), 330–348. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654312457429

Vaden, A. (2021). Meet Indi, the First Sphero Robot for Early Learners. https://sphero.com/blogs/news/meet-sphero-indi