1.1 Why is design thinking important?

In a changing world, our students and future citizens need to be flexible, adaptable and ready to cope with situations they haven't seen before. Design thinking is a great set of processes to help students to:

  • develop confidence to respond and adapt to challenges

  • be able to develop innovative and creative solutions to the problems they face

  • become active and empathetic members of society that can contribute to solving complex issues (e.g. pollution, climate change) (Buhl et al., 2019 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] )

  • develop 21st-century skills (Matthews and Wrigley, 2017).

Further reading

The guide below gives more information about design thinking including visuals, videos, and templates you can use with your students:

There are several scientific studies examining the use of design thinking in industry to support the development of new products and services. Yet, there are not so many studies examining how design thinking can be effectively used in teaching, especially in primary and secondary education. Also, there are even fewer studies that try to use digital technologies to deliver most or all phases of design thinking to students.

What we know so far is that design thinking can connect students’ knowledge to real-life issues and promote creative thinking and problem solving across different disciplines. This can have a positive impact on the development of 21st-century skills (Razzouk and Shute, 2012; Aflatoony et al., 2017).

In a study conducted by Lin et al. (2024), the use of design thinking was employed to aid the teaching of Information Technology (IT) courses to junior middle school students. This study found that design thinking helped enhance the students’ creativity as shown in their digital works and also improved their awareness of using IT applications to solve everyday challenges.

In another study (Cutumisu et al., 2020), middle school students who used design thinking strategies, such as critical feedback-seeking and revising, performed better when designing digital posters. The findings of the study suggest that these design thinking strategies can have a positive association with student performance.

Certain phases of design thinking are shown to relate to specific learning outcomes, for example:

  • reflective skills were developed from defining a problem

  • critical thinking was practised when students were asked to identify a best solution

  • modelling enabled collaboration and communication.

    (Rusmann and Ejsing-Duun, 2022)

1 What is design thinking?

1.2 How is design thinking different to problem-based learning?