For this new academic year, Project-Based Learning will have a new theme – Design thinking and innovation. Following last year’s successful implementation of the theme – ‘Sustainable communities’, we are looking towards a different approach to Project-Based Learning this academic year. Design thinking is a term used to broadly represent a set of cognitive, strategic and practical processes by which design concepts are developed. This concept would be utilised in order to produce solutions to tackle real world problems.
Before PBL for this academic year is set in motion, workshops and seminars were held for the facilitators on UN sustainable development goals and different kinds of designs that could be potentially used productively during the PBL process. With prior training, our facilitators are much better equipped to help the learners achieve their goals.
The theme of design thinking offers our learners opportunities in fields such as web designing, graphic designing, fashion designing etc, if they would like to pursue it in the future. However, the idea of design thinking is mainly to create a thinking method which is systematic and creative at the same time. The facilitators were trained on some steps to understand design thinking better including the following steps – empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test.
This academic year, PBL will be integrated within the academic objectives of respective grades of the students. Through this PBL exercise, the school aims to train the learners with the concept of design thinking and innovation which includes budgeting, planning, organising, design (logos, packaging etc) and eventually attempt to formulate solutions to real world problems.
Several guest speakers were invited to provide training sessions on design thinking for the facilitators. These have helped facilitators gain a deeper understanding of design-thinking ; which would enable them to implement it in the teaching-learning process.
