Participatory Design Curriculum Promotes Engineering Design, Critical Thinking, and Creativity for Students From Kindergarten to 12th Grade

Critical thinking and creativity are the most valuable human resources for addressing today’s and tomorrow’s challenges. To foster the growth of these higher-order thinking skills, participatory design, which gives students the chance to work with users, should be included in engineering-design courses as a useful strategy. This study developed a participatory-design curriculum to improve students’ engineering-design behaviors and foster critical-thinking skills and creativity. Our study included 111 10th-graders. We compared the differences between an experimental participatory-design group and a control engineering-design group (limited and unlimited) for engineering-design and critical-thinking behaviors using lag sequential analysis and creativity using a creative product analysis matrix. We show that the participatory-design group displayed more significant engineering-design and critical-thinking behaviors compared to the other groups, but the creativity results were mixed. We conclude with possible strategies to implement participatory design to enhance students’ performance in engineering design, critical thinking, and creativity; offer insights for teaching; and strengthen the alignment of school curricula for upcoming higher-order thinking skill sets.