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Just like learning to ride a bike, students need education, practice, coaching, and experience.
Innovation has been an important aspect of economic and scientific success in the United States for decades. Hobday, Coffey, Saalfeld, and Colwell (2011) suggested that, in order to produce innovative ideas, one must have a design-thinking mentality. This article provides the readers with an example of brainstorming techniques that have been implemented in industry and also reflect the practices used by Purdue University, College of Technology freshmen students while working through a design problem. The authors propose that these techniques, delivered to over 3,000 students in an introductory design course, have direct applicability to secondary students. This text will describe brainstorming processes used in Purdue's College of Technology so that teachers may adapt and adopt these practices to their classrooms. The six brainstorming techniques are discussed along with how the students are evaluated in applying the techniques.
At Purdue University, the College of Technology students receive an education that is rooted in design. As part of a core curriculum, students take an introductory course, TECH 120 - Design Thinking in Technology, among other courses. TECH 120 students engage in the critical analysis of global challenges and related design problems. The course is similar to a high school engineering design course in that students also learn to take initiative in developing solutions by applying the principles of design. Specifically, this course applies a Human Centered Design (HCD) approach, which emphasizes understanding stakeholders, their needs and motivations, as well as impacts (positive and negative) of potential solutions on the stakeholders. Additionally, TECH 120 students apply mathematical, science, and technology concepts to solve design tasks. As an example, students engage in a sustainable design related to their college. Some student teams consider lighting in unused classrooms as a problem. To better understand the problem, students will identify and interview stakeholders, including students, faculty, maintenance staff, and security personnel, to discover why lights are left on. If they discover lights are left on for security reasons, they might consider alternatives that are less energy-demanding. If the issue is laziness and the last person to leave the room "forgot" to turn them off, students might consider motivational issues or prompting. Alternatively, perhaps the last person...