DRS2012 Bangkok Proceedings Vol 4 - Design Research Society

1668 Conference Proceedings
Transforming Constructivist Learning Into Action: Design thinking in education
experience to fail and stand up again, and learning-by-doing. It is
optimistic and gives you faith in your creative abilities by offering a process
to take action through when faced with a difficult challenge. Most of all,
Design Thinking does not deny the complexity of real-life phenomena and
thus, manages for learning to keep its relevance in the world, and for the
student. Design Thinking is constructive in that the student teams‘ selforganize
their knowledge within the phases of the process. Different
perspectives are taken into account and different approaches are
converged to a consensus. There is a high degree of student involvement,
the whole learning process is a situation for experiences, and a good
balance between instruction and construction is accomplished through the
iterative manner of the learning process.
As theoretically proofed, Design Thinking as a formalization of
constructivist learning would foster 21st century skills. In this paper the
success of realization of Design Thinking in a school context, and its
usability for teachers was tested.
− Do students like to work with Design Thinking and do they
actively participate?
− Do teacher like working with Design Thinking and are they likely
to use this method again?
− Does Design Thinking built up a positive learning atmosphere
between teacher and student?
Case study
Design Thinking was tested with high school students in order to analyze
and evaluate Design Thinking as a teaching method in comparison to
Dewey’s recommendations. The students and teachers motivation, the
learning atmosphere and the development of cognitive and social
competencies were the main criteria for analysis. An empirical study was
set up to prove the above stated hypotheses with the use of quantitative
questionnaires and the Inventory of Social Competence - ISK (Kanning,
2009). A three-day case study took place in a secondary school in
Potsdam, Germany, involving 125 students and a team of 12 teachers and
coaches. The students were divided into 22 teams of 5 to 6 students each,
to face the real-world challenge „New Media in the classroom - How can
we help teacher to use new media efficiently in the classroom?“ . The
Design Thinking process, as described above was used by 11 teams. One
Design Thinking coach was facilitator for two teams. These 11 Design
Thinking teams were compared to 11 teams using the project-based
method (Kilpatrick, 1918). One teacher was facilitator for two teams in this
experimental category. The coaches were prepared in a training session.