Abstract:

ICT is universally recognized as a high growth sector expected to drive economic growth in the near future. Its development is fuelled by a high demand for digital services as a result of the rapid evolution of computer networks. To meet societal and industry needs ICT education needs to evolve at a pace that follows technological innovation. Given the rapid growth of technology, which results in the fast obsolescence of services and products, the most important skill that educational institutions can build among young students is their innovation capacity as well as critical and analytical thinking to enable them to stay at the edge of their field throughout their career.

In view of the above, ICT-INOV aims to enrich the potential of ICT higher education in Asia and Europe to harvest the innovation potential of students empowering them to bring ideas into action. By deploying the gamified design thinking approaches for building a highly-skilled ICT workforce the project intends to develop a holistic learning intervention that builds physical and digital infrastructures, innovative digital content, and instructor capacity to deploy emerging digitally-enabled learning design. In particular, the projects aims at a gamified, design thinking-based learning framework to foster innovation; a digital learning platform that sustains collaboration in design thinking contexts and promotes engagement through gamification; digital learning activities to encourage students in thinking creatively through design thinking approaches; instructor training and community building events for promoting the adoption of the proposed learning intervention.

Thus, within the context of the above-mentioned goals, the article reports on the results obtained so far. In particular, the analysis of the survey aimed at the examination of students’ engagement and expectations for building innovation skills is provided. In addition, the detailed learning needs analysis and methodical learning framework based on experiential approaches integrating design thinking and gamification elements are presented.

The project is funded by the Capacity Building in Higher Education Erasmus+ program and is implemented in Greece, Malaysia, Vietnam, Pakistan, Nepal, Portugal, Italy, and Estonia.

Keywords:

Innovation, Technology, research projects, ICT education, Design thinking.