DESIGN KIT EDU: um toolkit para promover a criatividade na aprendizagem

Abstract

This dissertation aims to present the conception and materialization of an educational content for higher education that uses Design Thinking (DT) as a teaching-learning strategy, with the goal of fostering the exercise of creativity and problem solving. The content is entitled “Design Kit EDU”, created with the aim of providing interactions between teacher-student, student-student, teacher-content and student-content, from which teachers feel encouraged to plan different activities, using a set of artifacts in their classes, at the same time that students are motivated to develop varied skills and establish relationships with knowledge (cognitive domain), doing (psychomotor domain) and being (affective domain) . The content consists of four artifacts, namely: the “Composition Chart”, the “Empathy Dice”, the “Ideas Lane” and the “Feedback Cards”. All of these artifacts establish guidelines by the Design Thinking (DT) methodology, which means they are centered on the subjects who are part of the interactions or who may benefit from the interactions. This proposition has as a theoretical reference the discussions on design, Design Thinking (DT), Instructional Design (DT), active methodologies and creativity. For the development of the research reported in this dissertation and its product, different methodological procedures were adopted. The approach was qualitative and, among the procedures, bibliographic, documentary and experimental research were used. For the stage of content planning and design of the artifacts, the stages of the “classic” Instructional Design were used. The artifacts were made with analog interactions, which means that part of the materials were built in a tactile and fixed way, while the other part is made of glued or sewn with different papers, cutouts, textures and visuals. 14 inspirations were consulted during the research and all, in some way, deal directly or indirectly with the themes “Design Thinking”, “creativity” and “problem solving oriented to the educational context”, even though most of the inspiring materials deal with the corporative education. Finally, in this dissertation, the artifact verification process is reported, which was configured as a pilot study whose sessions followed a semi-structured script (Evaluation Matrix), in which the main product of this work, the “Design Kit EDU”, was briefly presented and submitted to the guests' analysis. The sample of specialists was formed by 20 guests, mostly teachers of Higher Education at the Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPA). However, the sessions also included professional master students from the Postgraduate Program Creativity and Innovation in Higher Education Methodologies (PPGCIMES), recent graduates, masters and graduates of the Program, in addition to professors linked to other educational institutions. From this verification process, it was possible to receive several contributions, some of which have already been incorporated into the product presented in this dissertation and others will be analyzed later for the future improvement of the educational content and its artifacts.