Rosa Doran

Design Thinking for Education – A GSO4SCHOOL’s Tale

By Rosa Doran & Priscila Doran, NUCLIO – Núcleo Interativo de Astronomia

This workshop intends to present to the audience the Design Thinking model that is being adopted for the Global Science Opera for Schools project. Design Thinking is a methodology, initially embraced by business in general, that intends to provide products’ designers with the necessary background information about their final target audience. The model has been recently more widely adopted in the field of education as a mean to help educators get a better understanding about their students and the communities where they live. A series of success stories will be shared, namely the ones related to the integration of design thinking to the support of the open schooling movement. The model used for instance in the project Open Schools for Open Societies, an EC project that reached over 1000 schools and more than 2300 teachers, went one step ahead and equipped students with the necessary skills to use the DT model to address problems prevailing in their own communities.  By using the four steps of the design thinking methodology for education, students were able to better understand the sources of the problems and create possible solutions, while engaging relevant stakeholders in the community. The four step: FEEL, IMAGINE, CREATE and SHARE will be presented along with a vision for its integration for STEAM learning opportunities.