Author: Kai Pata

DesignIT platform was this autumn in use in Metropolia UAS in a mobile project course. The course spans two months and worth 15 ETCS and last for one period and includes students from various countries as the course belongs to the international ICT program. Thus, the student teams have members from various countries and cultures. In addition, this year we also had exchange students to bring even more variety into the student population. The aim of the course is to solve wicked problems provided by external real customers. Usually the situations are mobile application or something that is usable with mobile devices.             This year we had 6 customers and 13 student teams. Meaning most customers had two teams which tried to solve the challenge they had provided for the course. The…

22-23rd of November the Erasmus+ DesignIT project team met in Porto Polytechnic. Project coordinator Kai Pata and Anet Põdra introduced the results of the interrim report and the team discussed how to meet the upcoming challenges. Olivier Heidmann introduced the final developments the team has made with DesignIT tool. The tool is coming close to the planned functionalities and can be used now with different design challenges settings. The new features relate with gamified approach of motivating the players to submit the challenges according to the preplanned templates, doing peer-review to challenges to gain points, inviting the competing teams to contribute with ideas on their challenge (it takes off points), or asking advice from the game master (takes off points). The team is still working in developing the feature  for…

Today i run another successful event of testing DesignIT prototype with a group of ten Andragogy students during my course Community involvment technologies for adult learners. The learners were all working on the same challenge during the ideacollection phase in DesignIT tool. They tried to identify digital opportunities of outdoor learning for adults. After the idea collection phase the group was divided into two design groups who used the collected information for ideation. Finally the students in groups presented the ideas and uploaded the images of their final ideation model back to the DesignIT tool. They also filled in the feedback survey.  

Today my students from educational technology and gaming (17) were successfully testing out the design thinking process with our DesignIT tool prototype in Tallinn University. I prepared three challenges: smart and sustainable digital learning ecosystem in schools, inclusive digitally enhanced learning ecosystem in schools, and the digital learning ecosystem that promotes wellbeing and health. The first impression was that it supported very well the creative process. Some additional advancements were suggested, such as uploading images from links, allowing to lock the note you are working with so that others would not delete it. Students generalised digital learning ecosystem models based on the ideas, and used the mobile version of the tool in discussions. Final ideas were embedded back to the next stage of the challenge. Students are eager to test…

The project team conducted the survey among 250 higher education students from Estonia, Greece, Portugal and Finland to establish the state of art of Design thinking skills development. Figure: Approaches to Design thinking at higher education courses Almost half of the participants (40.3%) responded that they don’t really know if their university offers a specially designed course that focuses on design thinking approaches. Only 27.8% have been involved in a design thinking related course, while 72.2% have never attended any of these. 17 % of students were unaware of the Design thinking concept, 45 % had heard of it but did not know what it really standed for, and 36 % of students were familiar with Design thinking principles. As claimed by the participants, design thinking is   “a creative approach, which…

DesignIt project meeting was held in Tallinn University, Estonia at May 10-11th, 2018. The project members from Finland, Greece, Estonia and Portugal discussed the wireframes of the gamified DesignIT ideation tool. The tool enables the game master (teacher or student) to prompt design challenges. Related with each challenge the boards with ideation templates can be set up. The tool enables to upload various open source design thinking templates to support the phases of: Contextual inquiry Interview users to get their problems Develop design idea, validate the idea what are user challenges Do first mockup and validate it Validate prototype Players can assign themselves to the design challenges. Process of collecting evidences is gamified. Each challenge has a time-frame, and after it ends the players need to upload it to the review.…

Students of Metropolia Henri Taussi and Teemu Viisanen developed the wireframes for gamifying the DesignIT game. The app is aimed for gamified team-based ideation in the design thinking process. The design challenges are set up for players to collect ideas on different type of canvases and to brainstorm. The teams can compete on how they complete the canvases with content, as well as buy suitable content for their canvases from other teams. The goodness of contents for the specific challenge is evaluated by game master and other players. The experience points are used for ranking teams and players. The coins are used for transactions. DesignIT game user interface consist of four main tabs which are lobby, progress, work map and review. Lobby: At the sign in stage gamemaster (a teacher) can decide game…

The first draft of the a gamified platform for supporting the ideation phase of the design thinking was discussed at the project skype meeting in January.

The gamified design thinking apprach for DesignIt was developed together with the students from Metropolia. First phase was the kick off meeting. Members of the project described how they understood the topic of design thinking and what the goal should be for the serious game. After which, we discussed what kind of constraints, values and gaps there might be in creating such a game for students and teachers (see e.g. Tran 2017 and IDEO 2013). The session of discussion amounted into two documents drafting the potential idea of the game to be created – a draft concept of the game. Second phase consisted on detecting gaps and constraints we had found in the phase one and which needed further investigation. We could have used the Data Canvas (number 3 in…

At the project kick-off meeting in Volos, Thessaloniki University (26-27.10.2017) the team discussed how to investigate the state of art of teaching design thinking in the partner countries. The team was planning how to gamify the empathization and ideation phase of design thinking. The first gamified design thinking practices will be developed by and tested in Fall 2018.