Assessing the Effect of Introducing Design Education on Middle-Year Students’ Creative, Critical, and Problem-Solving Skills

Critical, Creative and Problem-solving skills have been described by many companies as the most in-demand skills. Also, innovation and change has been a key part of our life nowadays. Design programs for undergraduate students involve many courses which increase the students’ Creative, Critical and Problem-solving skills through the project-based teaching pedagogy. Design & Technology in school education is a very new subject when compared with the traditional subjects like Mathematics, Science, Social studies etc. Further, it is not taught as a subject, which forces the students to join special tuitions to get admitted into the design programs. As per the study performed in the present work, the schools in the villages are very less exposed to design learning. Although some part of the syllabus focuses on building such skills in isolation through the exercise and assignments, a much integrated and holistic approach is needed for the better development of in-demand skills which can be developed through Design Education. Hence, this paper is an attempt to develop and test certain activities with the school students of rural areas which will be focused on Design Education and shall result in better learning of the required skills. The proposed approach will follow studying and analysing the content in the present textbooks of traditional subjects like Art, Mathematics and Science. Since, all these subjects have contents to help the students develop the creative and problem-solving skills to some extent. Based on the study, a novel course/content on Design Education is proposed which will be provided to the student in the form of a Workbook/activity sheet which can be solved by middle-year students and by the assessment of the same will allow the evaluator to understand their learning/skill development.