Abstract:

First-year high school students are presented with an easy task: find a social need and design an artifact that can help solve it. However, is it really easy to look at somebody else and assume what their problems are and how to solve them? You might be right, but that is rarely the case. During this project, we gave high school students a setting to observe the needs of people in a vulnerable community and they talked to their caretakers to be able to begin to understand what they go through each day. Having empathized with their problems and needs, students had a better chance to come up with solutions for their problems. Also, they had the opportunity to present and test the solutions directly with the final users allowing students to validate their designs. Design thinking, being an iterative process, allowed students to understand problems and create solutions that can be tangible and tested as many times as required. This is where 3D printing came to the rescue, instead of using raw materials and transforming them through manual labor, a model was created making it easier for students to tweak it according to the findings in the early test stages. As a bonus, students acquired a 21st century skill being now able to model and print designs made through rapid prototyping. Online modeling software makes possible for any student to acquire volumetric design skills without buying any license. Volumetric design skills, when developing spatial ability, also develops another skillset never experienced. The results were incredible, students were intrinsically motivated by knowing their artifact was more than just another school assignment, namely, it could potentially change the quality of life of a person and as a result, the quality and detail of the design was vast.

Keywords:

Design, Rapid prototyping, 3D printing, STEM, technology education, maker, makerspace, design thinking.