Combining Design Thinking with Emerging Technologies in K-12 Education

The use of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and 3D printing are amongst the EU targeted actions for supporting the digital transformation of education. Yet, despite these technologies being accessible to education stakeholders, there is a lack of concrete pedagogy and teachers’ professional development for their meaningful integration into the current educational context. Extending Design Thinking with Emerging Digital Technologies – Exten (D.T.)2 - is a European funded project aiming to use emerging technologies to enhance the pedagogical value, sustainable digitization, and potential for wide deployment of Design Thinking (DT). DT is a promising pedagogical innovation, based on interdisciplinary co-creation, that can lead to sustainable educational innovation and development of students’ 21st century skills. In this paper, we describe the main components of the proposed educational transformation as developed during the first year of Exten (D.T.)2 including the theoretical foundations of the approach, the co-creation processes for meaningful engagement of teachers with educational innovation. Moreover, we present the educational technology tools (design, extensions, architecture) that are used in the project and the evaluation approach for capturing impact on improving students’ skills and competencies.