Taking High School Students through the Design Thinking Process
A recap of what I learnt from facilitating 3 workshops with High School students.
The Event
Spark Festival 2019 is Australia’s largest event for startups, innovators and entrepreneurs happening across all of NSW in October. I was a volunteer facilitator for an event where High School students across NSW were invited to learn about Entrepreneurial skills and mindset by applying Design Thinking methodology to solve problems.
The purpose was to open their mind to different ways of problem solving. Entrepreneurs would share with students the problem space that they were operating in (without telling them the solution) and we would facilitate Design Thinking activities to help them solve the problem.
Mel Fyfe from Blakthumb sharing her solution to her problem space
The Structure of the workshop
Each facilitator had 10–20 students. There were 16 facilitators and 250 students from different schools and grades.
Each group of students would be taken through 3 workshops: Empathy, Ideate, Prototype & Pitch.
Students would hear from an Australian entrepreneur in each workshop who shared with them their problem worth solving. Although this didn’t allow students to go through the Design Thinking process with the same problem, it exposed them to different entrepreneurs and problems.
The entrepreneur would share their solution at the end of the workshop.
Each workshop was 50–60 minutes.
Welcoming students to the event
What went well
The team at Spark Fest were incredibly organised with the event which made the day run very smoothly.
The entrepreneurs had incredible problems they were solving which made it very inspiring for both the facilitators and the students.
Students enjoyed being exposed to different entrepreneurs.
Students were very creative when coming up with ideas, they were brave and got straight into the activities.
What was challenging
Noise levels — There were multiple groups in the same room, and it was very hard to explain the concepts and instructions clearly for everyone to hear.
Different grades in one group meant varying levels and engagement.
Bigger groups of students working together who knew each other got more distracted easily.
It was hard for students to fully understand the problem space in such a short amount of time.
What I learnt
Students like to dive straight into the activity. I spoke to each table individually to explain the activity as it was challenging to explain the concept to the entire group due to noise levels.
Keeping strict timing was difficult. The session became heavily weighted on the activity and the problem space that the entrepreneur explained. It was easiest to simply get the students into the activity and answers questions as they went along, than explaining the concept to them first.
Not every student will be engaged. I just had to accept that.
Prizes help motivate their engagement.
Students don’t need to dive too much into the problem to come up with ideas. The more simplified the problem statement, the easier for them to come up with ideas.
Students have the creativity and capacity to apply the Design Thinking process to any problem they want to solve, it’s more about making them aware of it and allowing them to practice it more frequently.
Some of the facilitators and entrepreneurs for the event.
This was my first time facilitating high school students and my learnings are mostly around student engagement. I was very grateful to have been part of this event and seeing students get the opportunity to learn from incredibly entrepreneurs. It was a day of innovative thinking and brilliant ideas. Thank you to the team for making this happen and I know this is only the first of many more to come!