Teach Design in Your Class
Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.
Design thinking in the school curriculum
You may conduct design thinking projects at your school as one-off exercises; as workshops; they may be done as club activities; as courses running over a term; or design thinking may even be taught as a subject like mathematics, increasing in difficulty over the twelve years of school. However you plan to teach design thinking in your school curriculum, this website is for you.
Design thinking for all levels of school
All the information that you need to run a design project in your class can be found in the Design Thinking for Schools website for free, covering elementary, middle, and high school for a typical twelve-year school programme. Naturally, teaching design thinking to a six-year-old child is a very different proposition to teaching it to a seventeen-year-old. Therefore, this website provides for teaching design thinking at four distinct levels:
- Level I for 6 to 8-year-old children, in the first three years of school.
- Level II for 9 to 11-year-old children, in years 4, 5, and 6 of school.
- Level III for 12 to 14-year-old students, in years 7, 8, and 9 of school.
- Level IV for 15 to 17-year-old students, in the final three years of school.
An ounce of practice is generally worth more than a ton of theory.
Do a design project in your class, step-by-step
Supervising a design project in your class is complicated, more so where advanced students are undertaking advanced design topics. The simple way forward is to follow the process outlined below, using the resources of the Design Thinking for Schools website. Print and use the checklist below as you plan and implement a design project in your class.
- Read the introductions on this website:
- About Design
- About Design Thinking
- Teach Design in Your Class (this page)
- Choose a design topic (or exercise) for your class:
- The guides for teachers will help you to supervise a design project, follow the design thinking process, ensure everyone’s safety, and assess and mark student design work:
- Guides for Teachers
- These handouts guide the students on how to mind map, how to brainstorm, how to be creative, and so forth:
Practice makes perfect
Just as students improve their design skills and creative confidence with practice, so too will teachers improve their knowledge, supervising skills, and confidence with experience. Teachers and students with the experience of having done a couple of design projects will be better able to plan, manage, and supervise projects in future. The best advice is to begin — you learn how to design (and how to teach design) by doing.
Status update
This website has about 240 webpages of content! We will continue adding to that total. The content is online for all levels of school student, and it is all freely available to you.
About design topics…
Read the next section to browse the design topics for your level of student.