Design Journey Dashboard: A Web Tool to Support Teaching Design Thinking

Design skills are increasingly recognized as a core competency for software professionals. Unfortunately, these skills are difficult to teach because design requires freedom and open-ended thinking, but new designers require a structured process to keep them from being overwhelmed by possibilities. Students need clearly communicated expectations and an easy way of tracking responsibilities to keep their team on track. Teachers need the capabilities of monitoring progress and giving timely feedback. This project will realize a vision for a Design Journey Dashboard specifically designed to give project teams and their teachers an overview of the process in a Web App. STaBL Foundation will use this tool to support Design Thinking workshops and summer camps allowing it to scale up its teaching of design within an outreach program which currently introduces thousands of children to coding in Canada and around the world.

One strategy recommended for making software education pathways more attractive to women students is to connect it to real-world social, health and environmental problems. Building design into coding outreach will allow us to make this connection. For example, we have used screening for Parkinson’s Disease as an experiential learning challenge in summer camps.

Faculty Supervisor:

Spencer Smith;Christopher Anand;Christopher Anand;Spencer Smith

Student:

Partner:

Fondation STaBL Foundation

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Education

University:

McMaster University

Program: