Abstract:

Design Thinking methodologies have shown their relevance in developing creative and innovative solutions to wide range of problems (Brown, 2009; IDEO, 2015). Today’s dramatical changes in both society and technology reveal that improving children’s education is one of today’s most relevant challenges. In this sense, given the demonstrated importance of games in learning processes (van Oers, 2010) we believe that is urgent to innovate in the way scientific thinking is taught today in the first grades of basic education.

In this sense, knowing about the advances of Design Thinking in the field of education (Koh, Chai, Wong, & Hong, 2015) and having experience using it at an innovation lab and teaching it at university; we decided to use this approach in a one-semester course at the School of Education. This course was fundamentally oriented towards the stimulation of children’s mathematical thinking through game’s design. The objective of the course was to provide our students with Design Thinking tools such as design research, ideation and prototyping for creating and designing engaging and innovative games for children.

To do this, we assembled an interdisciplinary group of lecturers: an architect, with experience in design thinking; a psychologist, with experience in statistics teaching and educational chess; a mathematician, with experience in education and research in mathematics education, an industrial designer and a social psychologist. The course was given to 22 students from a wide range of backgrounds: education, psychology, architecture, business, communications, economics and philosophy.

After a few introductory sessions of design thinking, mathematical thinking, children’s psychology and game design; the class was divided in four interdisciplinary groups. Each of them had to design a game for primary school children developing one of the following skills: spatial thinking, probabilistic thinking, symbolic thinking and the discovery and creation of patterns. The students made prototypes of different scales and resolutions; tested them with children; gathered feedback from the class and the teachers; and iterated the design of the game based on the obtained feedback.

At the end of the semester, the four teams created four different games which were exposed in front of a jury composed by education specialists from the public and private sectors as well as the class teachers. The games were highly valued considering variables such as consistency with the chosen skill, originality and educational potentiality.

Some finding of this experience are around the importance of interdisciplinary and collaborative design, inter and intragroup feedback sessions and the involvement of kids during the design and test of the games in order to make them engaging. Based on this experience, our recommendation is that courses like this one should be included in the study plans of basic education teachers, educational psychology and ongoing training of in-service teachers

References:
[1] Brown,T. (2009). Change by design. New York: HarperCollins ed.
[2] IDEO.org. (2015). The field guide for design focused on the human being. IDEO
[3] Koh, J.H.L; Chai, C.S; Wong, B; Hong, H.-Y. (2015). Design thinking for education. Conceptions and applications in teaching and learning. Singapore: Springer.
[4] van Oers, B. (2010). Mathematical thinking emergent in the context of the game. Educational Studies of Mathematics, 74, 23-37.

Keywords:

Design thinking, design research, prototyping, spatial thinking, probabilistic thinking, symbolic thinking, pattern recognition, mathematical thinking.