For this week's presentation, I found
an article entitled "7 Things You Should Know About Design
Thinking". You can read it here:
I decided to choose it, because I've
never heard about "design thinking" before. Having read the
article, I still don't understand, why it is called "design
thinking" (maybe you can help me with that?), but nonetheless it
is a teaching method practiced in higher education. The single
sentence that best describes it is: "[a] shift from testing
students to having students test their work".
In other words, students are encouraged
to creatively find solutions to problems on their own and without the
fear of failure by trying as many different approaches as they can
and then evaluating the results. For example, teams of students can
take part in a game, where they need to find information from public
records by visiting a government institution, or trying to find it
online and to see what works best. The idea is to focus on doing
rather than discussing or theoretical thinking. According to the
article, this way of practical prototyping and testing results in
faster development of working solutions to real-world problems.
Questions:
1. Would you agree that early failure
leads to better outcomes? Can you give an example of your own?
2. Do you prefer to engage in
brainstorming ideas and trying different ways of solving a problem,
or are you more inclined to first learn about the problem and then
propose the best solution?
3. I think it's difficult to predict
how successful this method can be. There's a risk that it can devolve
into a lot of wasted effort and few results in the end. What do you
think?
4. What classes / subjects can you
think of that would benefit from this approach the most?
