Abstract
‘Innovation and Design’ (I and D) and ‘Global citizenship and Social enterprisingness’ (GC and SE) are two University-wide themes for materializing across different domains. To support these two themes, CLEAR obtained funding from TDLEG (2016-19) to promote a culture of innovation and social enterprisingness among students.
Built on the success and valuable experience gained in the 16-19 project, CLEAR intends to sustain student interest and enthusiasm by requesting for financial support for a follow-up project. Similar to the previous project, the proposed project aims at nurturing innovative minds by supporting and encouraging students to put forward their explorations and experiments focusing on one or more of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The project will work on the following initiatives:
- Establishing a community of practice on promoting innovation among teachers who are interested in encouraging out of the box thinking and promoting curiosity, critical thinking, deep understanding, and creative brainstorming in their courses;
- Establishing a community of students who demonstrated outstanding performance in the student challenge last year to be student ambassadors;
- Organising training workshops for teachers and students on design tools, creative tools and their application, curriculum design and pedagogies conducive to promoting innovative and creative minds;
- Organising a student competition to encourage students to explore, experiment and put in practice new ideas to solve problems by developing technology-based prototypes or social innovation plans;
- Providing individual structured coaching for each shortlisted team;
- Organising a student exposition to showcase the entry projects, and disseminate to the student community the products of innovation and design;
- Conducting de-briefing sessions to enable each team to crystalize and transfer their experience in the journey of innovation to other contexts; and
- Enriching the webpage built from the previous project for dissemination purposes.
Brief write-up
Project objectives
Establishing a community of practice on promoting innovation among teachers who are interested in encouraging out of the box thinking and promoting curiosity, critical thinking, deep understanding, and creative brainstorming in their courses;
Organising training workshops for teachers on design tools, creative tools and their application, curriculum design and pedagogies conducive to promoting innovative and creative minds; and
Enriching the webpage built from the previous project for dissemination purposes.
Activities, process and outcomes
‘Design Thinking for Education – The Fundamentals’ – a three-hour hands-on workshop for CUHK teachers conducted by a certified trainer in Design Thinking – Participants were introduced some design and creative tools applicable in teaching and had hands-on experience in the applications.
‘Appropriating Design Thinking for “Good” lesson Design – Opportunities and Challenges for University Lectures’ – a sharing session delivered by Dr Joyce Koh. Participants were introduced design dispositions and lesson design practices, design consideration and applying design thinking in lesson design.
Updating content of the project webpage
Deliverables and evaluation
End of workshop surveys were conducted to collect participants’ evaluation. Results indicated that both workshops were well received, and objectives were achieved.
The enriched webpage carried useful information for teachers on application of design thinking in their course design and delivery.
Dissemination, diffusion, impact and sharing of good practices
The webpage enriched its content to provide key characteristics of design thinkers and factors of design thinking in education based on literature review.
There are two videos of characteristics of design thinking in education showing teachers the uniqueness of design thinking in education.
Impact on teaching and learning
With enhanced understanding of what design thinking entails and how design thinking can be applied in curriculum design and delivery, teachers will be better equipped to adopt design thinking in their teaching in order to support their students in their development of an innovative mindset and creative thinking.
