Teaching Design Thinking in a C-STEAM Project: A Case Study of developing the Wooden Arch Bridges’ Intelligent Monitoring system

C-STEAM is an educational concept of interdisciplinary integration (STEAM) oriented to cultural inheritance(C), which aims to not only cultivate students' thinking skills such as scientific inquiry, but also take into account the penetration of local cultural education. This research mainly explored the integration of cultural education, scientific inquiry and project creation in order to achieve the training goal of design thinking. This study took the "Wooden Arch Bridges’ Intelligent Monitoring system " project as an example, based in the five-stage model of design thinking (Empathize-Define-Ideate-Prototype-Test) to deepen two key processes (Characteristic Inquiry and Create Artifact). In our research, students cultivated empathy by watching wooden arch bridge cultural documentaries and other education activities, learnt the culture of wooden arch bridges from the perspective of bridge engineers and other roles, learnt the principle of forces (Physics) of wooden arch bridges by building a wooden arch bridge (Traditional Building Skills of Wooden Arch Bridges, Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage, Engineering), defined the reasons for the endangerment of wooden arch bridges due to natural disasters and so on(Geography, Physics, Information Technology), cleared the project goals of how to protect the wooden arch bridge, and used open source hardware and graphical programming to ideate and prototype (Information Technology, Engineering). Finally, after testing and optimizing, students realized the development of the physical project sand table of Wooden Arch Bridges’ Intelligent Monitoring system. The research was conducted in H Elementary School in Guangzhou, China. Through classroom observations and after-school interviews, we obtained the conclusion that students had a positive experience of Chinese wooden arch bridge culture, and their design thinking have been developed.