Fun Until the Limits: Students' Perceptions of Design Thinking Projects with Digital Tools

Design thinking (DT) is an approach used to address complex societal issues by engaging learners in hands-on problem-solving. Current educational guidelines seek to leverage the synergies between DT, digital literacy, and computational skills to enhance students' understanding and application in real-world matters, such as cyber-security and online awareness. However, tackling such learning experiences requires a shift in teaching approaches and the endorsement of educational technologies to foster digital agency. This empowers students to become proactive, informed participants in the digital future, starting from the classroom. To explore the feasibility of this approach from the students' perspectives, our study carried out a DT project with a block-based programming platform to emphasize the importance of cyber-security. Our study involved 113 students aged 10 to 12 across three K-12 schools. Of these, 52 agreed to participate in data collection via a semi-structured interview at the end of the project to share their experiences. We gained insights into students' perceptions regarding collaboration, technology interaction, and knowledge gained through thematic analysis of the interview data, considering both challenges and potential. For instance, we shed light on roadblocks arising from mismatched tool affordances and students' familiarity, as well as topic differentiation in elaboration based on participants' skills. At the same time, DT potential, when paired with digital tools, emerged to ease into everyday wicked problems in an engaging way and foster solution-oriented thinking.