The effectiveness of design thinking on K-12 school students’ creativity in a maker curriculum

The role of creativity has been well recognized in wholesome development of children’s personality and attitude. Among various approaches to foster creativity in children, design thinking (DT) has emerged as a significant approach. The study presented in this paper explores the implementation of DT into maker education to help K-12 students acquire creativity effectively. Majority of the studies in the literature have measured students’ creativity using a traditional creative ability scale, instead of work performance or both. We proposed a Three-Stage DT Framework (TSDTF) suitable for maker education, which has three stages, namely pre-design, in-design and post-design. TSDTF provides more specificity to indicate students’ learning process iteratively. Then we applied TSDTF to the 3D model-design curriculum to see the impact on the students’ work performance, learning achievement, and creativity ability. The study engaged two sixth-grade classes, with a total of 90 students, wherein the experimental group (45 students) was taught using TSDTF and the control group (45 students) was taught with traditional pedagogy. The results showed that there was no significant difference in basic knowledge of learning achievements for the students in both groups, while the students in the experimental group improved their work performance, operational skill of learning achievements, and creative ability more significantly than those in the control group. The qualitative analysis of the interview data revealed that the DT approach helped the students to be creative, thus enabling them to develop innovative works. The study showed that it is important for teachers to utilize the DT learning strategy in maker education in developing the students’ creative thinking.