he Design Initiatives team collaborates with partner school districts and community organizations, as well as with Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College students, faculty and staff, to develop innovative solutions to the “wicked” problems in education. To
achieve this, we use an intentional, collaborative, open-ended design process that values local context, diverse perspectives, intrapreneurial thinking and iterative testing of solutions.
“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” — Herbert Simon
Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown, by understanding the human needs involved, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, by creating many ideas...
If there is a makerspace in your school, it may be down the hall, in the library, or in another building. If there is someone other than the teacher managing the makerspace or there is a schedule for the school, your kids may only be able to use it once a week or month. Some makerspace activities may be focusing on how to use the resources available and may not be connecting the activities to the curriculum or around a real world problem. If this is how the makerspace is set up in your school, then your kids may not have access to the resources, materials, and tools when they need them, especially for STEM or STEAM
R. Müller, and K. Thoring. Leading Innovation through Design: Proceedings of the DMI 2012 International Research Conference, page 181-192. University of Virginia, (2012)