Some days ago, my father got a message from Butterfly Edufields that they were launching a Design Thinking workshop online for kids. I had no idea what Design Thinking meant or what it was. At first I didn’t want to attend this workshop but my father was very keen and said it would be useful, informative and fun for me. Then he gave me a basic idea about it and I thought it sounded interesting and I should attend it.
What is Design Thinking
Design of a product requires several properties combined together in the best possible manner to suit user’s requirements.
Design Thinking is a process involving various stages such as asking the right questions, detecting problems, ideating solutions, building prototypes to test the solution and coming up with the final product as per user’s actual requirements.
The stages of Design Thinking process are depicted below :
I know the first 3 terms might be hard to understand, so let me try to simplify these for you.
Empathize means to understand the user’s issues and challenges and being in his/her shoes. There may be more than one type of user. Eg: In school, students are not happy with the long answer questions during tests. Even teachers find it time consuming to check long answers.
Define is to clearly understand the users and know their actual needs, and to be able to write the statement (Dad told me a big word for it — hypothesis!). Eg: Tests assess the child’s knowledge and concepts. Test assessments should happen in a standard and quick way.
Ideate means to come up with different and innovative ideas to make the product according to the user’s needs. Eg: Objective-type questions or MCQs for better results, faster checking and easy tests.
About The Workshop
So, the workshop was for 15 days. We did many hands-on activities like parachute making, paper helicopter, etc. with readily available material, which was quite fun and interesting. The teachers encouraged us to discuss the concepts and also find out the scientific reasons behind them. After that, we had online quizzes related to the topic discussed. The teachers also gave us fun and easy assignments to do everyday.
In these sessions, we used various tools like Padlet, Scratch and TinkerCad. Padlet was used to collect and brainstorm ideas with everyone. We used Scratch to make games like the pong game which involves bouncing the ball off a paddle. 3-D drawings were made in TinkerCad which we used for prototyping.
In this workshop I learnt to make various prototypes, how to ideate solutions, how to ask the right questions, what is the process of Design Thinking etc. Even my communication skills improved a lot. I learnt how to design new things too.
I loved the pong game activity. It involved coding in ‘blocks’ and using various game elements called ‘sprites’. You can play my pong game from the below link
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/399209110
Below I have shared a Portfolio link in which we were told to present our ideas at the end of the workshop. It has the details and photos of what I did in the workshop. Do check it out!
https://sites.google.com/view/cucu-design-thinking/home
Going forward
The workshop taught me so many new things and I will definitely try to apply these in my daily life. I will talk to people to better understand their problems. I’ll build and create things as a hobby and also, if a problem comes I will solve it using this new process that I have learnt.
I really feel children should know the basics of Design Thinking, as it helps you to detect problems by asking the right questions and gives a good approach to solve them. If kids learn Design Thinking, they will have better communication skills, creative skills, building and thinking skills.
I would definitely recommend everyone to attend such a workshop and practically apply these concepts. These types of workshops or classes should be there in every school to teach Design Thinking. Does your school have one?
