Promoting design thinking and creativity by making: A quasi-experiment in the information technology course

Design thinking and creativity are instrumental elements of 21st century skills. In K-12 education, much is left to be known about how to develop curricula to more effectively foster students' design and creative thinking. This study introduced maker education to the information technology course to investigate the effects of design-oriented making on students' learning of programming, creativity, and design thinking. Seventy-two fifth-grade students from two classes at a rural primary school in China participated in this eight-week study. Both classes learned about programming a digital greeting card with Mind+, when the experimental group was taught with a design-oriented making pedagogy, whereas the control group learned through a conventional teaching approach. Questionnaires were used to assess students' knowledge learning, creativity and design thinking competence. Findings showed that when embedded in an open-ended problem-solving context, integrating design thinking into making as a pedagogy can be conducive to the development of design thinking and creativity. Important implications are made to inform future endeavors in fostering student thinking in maker education.