The SteamHead Design Immersion Curriculum

Abstract

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The SteamHead Design Immersion Curriculum builds upon the established educational values of existing design and technology curriculums to instill creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills in students across all subjects, in a holistic program that prepares them for the challenges of the future. Lessons are defined and measured via a series of "badges" that represent the level and degree of accomplishment in a given skill as students progress. "Immersion" encapsulates the integrated approach: like language, design thinking and technology are embedded in nearly every aspect of educational, personal, and business life, and design immersion frees these concepts from traditionally siloed subjects to cultivate creative problem solving as a dialect of learning.

Introduction

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The curriculum is meant to teach students all the tools they need to be innovative creators: from the high-level concepts of design planning and community impact all the way through to the hands-on digital and physical tools needed to enact their ideas. This method allows the most freedom and flexibility to students as possible.

The curriculum developed over several years of implementation and experimentation in the classrooms at Shenzhen American International School (SAIS), which made Project Based Learning central to its curriculum and philosophy and became the first entirely PBL school in Shenzhen — the ideal environment to develop this work. It is presented as a living document so that others in the education community might benefit; it may be used under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. For a commercial license or consulting services, contact SteamHead.

Learning Pathways

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Design thinking requires both a thorough understanding of abstract heuristics and hands-on interactive skills. The curriculum builds on the Stanford d.school's Design Thinking Process of "empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test," as well as a version of the "head, heart, hands" model. Four learning pathways divide skills into sensible categories, but should be understood as one gestalt design and creation process.

Community Impact

The most important, but also most esoteric, pathway — it addresses the need for meaning and purpose in students' work. Design thinking begins with empathy not only as a virtue but as a pathway to listening to and thinking about the needs of those around us, then defining a problem to solve. Students share their work as the final aspect of this pathway, reinforcing that their project has impact outside the classroom.

Design Process

The methods students need to ideate, manage, and revise their projects. Students pick up the problem defined in Community Impact and attempt to solve it: ideating solutions, drafting, organizing the steps and tools needed to prototype. The pathway teaches iteration and testing — the essential lesson that, contrary to the traditional mindset of "right or wrong answers," we often learn most from the trials and prototypes that don't work.

Fabrication Tools

Few things inspire more than seeing an idea come to life in physical form. The Fabrication Tools pathway grounds the design process and gives students the means to solve problems identified in Community Impact, requiring forethought, attention to detail, safety, and management of resources — whether through papercraft, woodcraft, and stitching, or 3D printers, laser cutters, and block circuits.

Digital Tools

Individual apps and languages are quickly swallowed by technological change, so this pathway focuses on the digital literacy, frameworks, and heuristics needed to use any digital tool. Students arrive steeped in the digital world, but they need educators modeling positive habits — from data security and privacy to file management. Digital tools open up entirely new modes of thinking and working, and students must be empowered with them to be ready for the future.

System of Badges

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The curriculum relies on a system of digital badges to measure student progress, allow open learning pathways, and encourage self-documentation. Badges can be implemented on open platforms such as Badgr and Mozilla's Open Badge Infrastructure. Research by Mozilla and ISTE among others has shown badges to be an effective, evidence-based system for measuring student performance based on actions taken, not facts memorized — important for the subjective topic of design. As students progress they self-document and "apply" for badges, so teachers can measure and reward progress in skills even when efforts toward a finished product fail or are abandoned: there is true, measurable educational value in the exploration and drafting phases of design.

The full badge matrix — 18 core design-thinking skills and the maker skill tiers — is presented on the Maker Badges page.