Review Article Stefanie Panke* Design Thinking in Education: Perspectives, Opportunities and Challenges

STEM / STEAM: Reflecting on the use of design 
thinking in an art class, Watson (2015) stressed that 
“Design Thinking has an important role as a bridge 
within STEAM education” (Watson, 2015, p. 18). Multiple 
examples support this view. Douglass (2016) shared 
ideas and techniques to enhance science teaching and 
described how kindergarten students gained a foundation 
for integrating science and engineering through design 
thinking. Gross and Gross (2016) described the use of 
the design thinking process for creating interactive 
sculptures created in an elementary STEAM club, moving 
from cardboard prototypes to programming with Scratch. 
Fouché and Crowley (2017) described how second 
graders used design thinking to create prototypes that 
prevent baby goats from escaping from the pen, gaining 
transferable problem-solving skills. Cook and Bush 
(2018) characterized design thinking as an opportunity 
to expand learning goals beyond the different subject 
areas of STEAM: “it provides a vehicle through which a true 
transdisciplinary learning experience can occur – where 
students are passionately invested in solving problems as 
they strive to make the world a better place” (Cook & Bush, 
2018, p. 102). Carroll (2014) described a case study in which 
university students worked with underserved middle 
school students as mentors in a STEM-based afterschool 
program. Both the mentors and the middle school 
students learned design thinking together. The shared 
experience allowed the university students to learn how to 
become a mentor, how to develop user-centered learning 
experiences, and how to share these experiences with 
middle school students. Motschnig et al. (2019) analyzed 
the educational intervention MadeByKids, that included 
a series of workshops and design challenges at 17 schools 
with children aged 7-12. The workshops were developed 
by adopting the Stanford Design Thinking Method for 
Kids with the goal to enhance computational thinking 
as well as collaboration skills. The authors observed that 
generally the participants did not seem to have problems 
acquiring digital competencies, while a lack of teamwork 
skills affected the project outcomes in some of the groups.
Geography: Anderson (2012) described a case study 
of elementary and middle school students who used 
design thinking to examine issues with living in rural 
and remote areas. The students subsequently designed 
illustrative multimedia presentations or computer games. 
Carroll et al. (2010) conducted a qualitative study that 
focused on the implementation of a design curriculum 
by a team of university instructors and graduate students 
during a middle school geography class in a public charter 
school serving grades K-3 and 7-8. The instructional goal 
of the project was to use design thinking to teach students 
about systems, an important element of geography. The 
students worked in teams through the design process to 
identify and redesign systems that existed at their school, 
such as the parking lot or the cafeteria.