67. Preparing Indian Children for 21st Century Through Design Education: Results from Workshops in Delhi Govt Schools

There has been worldwide recognition of changing needs of skills from academic graduates. The need for developing twenty-first century skills like critical thinking, creativity, and innovation has been argued by organizations like World Economic Forum, P21, OECD, ISTE, etc. Developing a mindset for innovation in children has been one of the key requirements for twenty-first century education. This paper argues that divergent thinking is one such component which is needed for building an innovative mindset and schools are the best place to start with. This study reports an investigative study conducted with 100 school students to observe the development of divergent thinking after they were taken through an eight-day design thinking workshop. The research methodology followed in this research was a pre-post activity to observe the differences in divergent thinking. The Torrance Test was used to observe the differences in divergent thinking. The students were given a design problem and were asked to ideate a few conceptual design solutions for the same. The data collected in this study was in the form of rough sketches made by students. Three experts were asked to evaluate the design solutions given by the students on various criteria such as fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration.