The Common Thread: Students as Designers

While it is the case that none of the design principles are to be understood in isolation, it is easier to see a stronger connection between certain principles. The final design principle, The Students as Designers Principle, has a very close relationship with The Ends Principle. In order to solve problems, students must create solutions. It should be noted that the element of creativity and the ability to design solutions tend to be highly sought after workplace attributes. Additionally, permitting the students to act as creators provides the teacher with some flexibility. Teachers can be open-ended about the end product or the means to reaching the end product. The Students as Designers Principle really brings the Knowledge Principle to fulfillment. When students are creating and designing, it permits them to use specific content in a thoughtful way. They engage in authentic activity, and can really make the content their own. Last but not least, Students as Designers naturally fosters collaboration among students. Truly great designs encourage students to bring their specific strengths to a project and merge those strengths with the strengths of other students. Design and collaboration also seem to go hand in hand.

In class, we focused on a specific product, a video. While creating a video is not the only way to have students creating, it does effectively demonstrate how students can be designers. We were the designers who were required to master a certain content, and figure out how to best communicate that in video form. My group also found that it was necessary to solve many smaller problems along the way so that our message was an accurate portrayal of the content. Our specific solution was a cooking show that included the perfect ingredients (the design principles). I’m interested to see how different groups tackled the problem. We also gained valuable video editing skills. Having a certain level of comfort with simple video editing and production is a hidden skill that will likely be beneficial to me down the road.  

The big takeaway here is that that students need to be given the opportunity to be designers. It can be uncomfortable in the traditional class setting to provide students with that much flexibility over their learning. I think, however, that enabling students to be designers should put much of that anxiety to rest. When students know that they have a problem to solve, they will typically rise to the challenge. Personally, I felt very engaged in the process of designing the video. The final design principle also opens up new, exciting questions. In what ways can we permit students to be designers? How can we find new problems to bring to students? In a way, permitting students to be designers is a common thread that ties everything together.