Design Thinking has always been one of the main pillars in which Adhyayan School has been standing. From the past, Adhyayan School has been experimenting with adapting Design Thinking on the curriculum as well as on the school’s management. Upon experimenting on different ways of implementing Design Thinking in the school, this year we have come up with a trimester event called Design Thinking Week where students apply the design thinking process to solve various real-world problems regarding topics related to their curriculum.
Design Thinking Process is a problem-solving approach that starts first from understanding the user or a scenario rather than assuming the problem, slowly moving towards understanding the problem, and finally innovating a solution. The design thinking process the following steps :
- Empathize: Develop a deep understanding of the challenge
- Define: Clearly articulate the problem you are trying to solve
- Ideate: Brainstorm the potential solutions
- Prototype: Design a prototype to test all or part of the solution
- Test: Engage in continuous short-cycle innovation process to continually improve the design
At Adhyayan Design Thinking Process starts way before Design Thinking Week, where students are provided with themes related to their curriculum. The themes are chosen by the DT Team of teachers where they carefully choose the themes so that students are not doing another project but learning their part of the curriculum while applying the Design Thinking Process.
Once students are divided into groups and provided with a theme for the trimester, they start the Design Thinking Process by going through each step starting from research and interviews which is the first step of the Design Thinking Process. In the process, the mentors keep track of the progress of each group and guide the groups along the process. Students start learning to communicate and collaborate in the group in the “Define” stage where they collaborate to clearly articulate the problem and in the “Ideate” stage they brainstorm for possible solutions to the problem and communicate their ideas among each other.
After Ideation, they start building up their prototype on leisure time utilizing the makerspace of the school. And after the terminal exam ends, DT week starts when everyone is completely focused and engaged in completing their prototype and testing them out. And on the final day of DT Week, everyone showcases their prototype in the form of an exhibition where the whole school participates in the event and provides feedback to each other.
In the process, our goal is to develop a problem-solving attitude, creativity, empathetic behavior, collaborative behavior, and innovativeness in our students.