Exploring Thai seventh Grade students' understandings of design thinking

Abstract

This study explores 35 Thai seventh grade students' understandings of design thinking. As design thinking is a process by which designers empatize human needs, define problems, create ideas, make prototypes, and test the prototypes, its important aspects are focused in this study These aspects include (1), human-centerness, (2) problem defining, (3) use of creativity, (4), collaborative work, (5) design constraints, (6), prototype testing, and (7) iterative process. The students' understandings regarding these seven aspects are examined using an open-ended questionnaire in corroboration with individual semi-structured interviews. The data are analysed using content analysis. The result reveals that most of students had proper understandings of four aspects, which are human-centerness, use of creativity, design constraints, and collaborative work. However, their understandings of the other three aspects (i.e., problem definition, prototype testing, and iterative process) are inadequate. This result provides insights into development of STEM design-based activities to enhance the students' better understandings of design thinking.