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

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.