Abstract

South Korean elementary schools mainly focus on increasing students’ proficiency in subjects related to science and engineering, while early education in design is ignored entirely. As a result, the concept of design and its value have become unpopular among the general public. Creative, young students are not exposed to environments that use design to develop problem solving approaches to improve integrated creativity. The present study demonstrates the design of a toolkit for teaching elementary school students the design process. The purpose of the proposed toolkit is to help students learn the concept of design with in-class problem-solving activities that can improve integrated creative thinking. We conducted a problem-solving activity with elementary school students based on the existing creative thinking models we incorporated in our proposed toolkit. Initially, we found that the proposed toolkit’s instructions were too complicated for the students to understand the context of the activity, and the entire process was observed as difficult. Based on our initial experiment, we revised the toolkit to minimize the difficulties students faced. We hope that the proposed toolkit will allow students to experience a problem-solving design process to enhance their integrated creative thinking.

Keywords

toolkit; elementary school students; design process; integrated creativity

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Share

COinS
 
Jun 25th, 12:00 AM

A Toolkit for Teaching the Design Process: A Case of Korean Elementary School Students

South Korean elementary schools mainly focus on increasing students’ proficiency in subjects related to science and engineering, while early education in design is ignored entirely. As a result, the concept of design and its value have become unpopular among the general public. Creative, young students are not exposed to environments that use design to develop problem solving approaches to improve integrated creativity. The present study demonstrates the design of a toolkit for teaching elementary school students the design process. The purpose of the proposed toolkit is to help students learn the concept of design with in-class problem-solving activities that can improve integrated creative thinking. We conducted a problem-solving activity with elementary school students based on the existing creative thinking models we incorporated in our proposed toolkit. Initially, we found that the proposed toolkit’s instructions were too complicated for the students to understand the context of the activity, and the entire process was observed as difficult. Based on our initial experiment, we revised the toolkit to minimize the difficulties students faced. We hope that the proposed toolkit will allow students to experience a problem-solving design process to enhance their integrated creative thinking.

 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.