Design Education and Learning
Using Design Thinking to create a new education paradigm for elementary level children for higher student engagement and success
Lesley-Ann Noel, Tsai Lu Liu
North Carolina State University (2)
lmnoel@ncsu.edu
Keywords: primary education, design thinking, design education, empathy, cognitive development
Abstract
Can design education have a positive impact on primary school education beyond merely preparing designers? As designers, we know almost intuitively that design education is ‘good education’, and most designers would affirm that it would be beneficial to expose children to design education, because of the benefits of the signature pedagogies of design, such as problem-based learning, human centred creativity and iterations of prototyping and testing. This paper seeks to review and synthesize existing literature and make preliminary analyses, which will support the development of design thinking education interventions at primary school level, which could lead to a paradigm shift in education at this level. While it has been widely demonstrated that design education can play a successful role in supporting traditional education models in the delivery of skills such as math and language arts, this paper seeks to demonstrate that in addition to meeting traditional education demands, design thinking principles in children’s education, such as empathy, collaboration and facilitation, human- centeredness, and creativity by iterations of prototyping and testing, will provide a sound base for children not only seeking to enter a design profession in the future but moving into any profession in the future and will lead to higher engagement at school and greater success in life.
This paper is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.
→ download the paper (PDF)
Cite this paper: Noel, L., Liu, T.L. (2016). Using Design Thinking to create a new education paradigm for elementary level children for higher student engagement and success. Proceedings of DRS 2016, Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference. Brighton, UK, 27–30 June 2016.
This paper will be presented at DRS2016, find it in the conference programme