The LCCC STEM teachers would like to thank Dr Anne Forbes, Senior Lecturer, STEM Education, at the University of Macquarie,
and her team, for their work on "Artificial Intelligence Education for Teachers". Available on Coursera, at this address:
https://www.coursera.org/learn/artificial-intelligence-education-for-teachers/home/welcome
and her team, for their work on "Artificial Intelligence Education for Teachers". Available on Coursera, at this address:
https://www.coursera.org/learn/artificial-intelligence-education-for-teachers/home/welcome
In this module you will learn about:
- design thinking and its origins, key principles, and steps
- how design thinking can be used in STEM and applied to problems involving AI
- creative thinking and critical thinking, and how they are related to other kinds of thinking skills
- how critical and creative thinking can help us develop and evaluate AI.
Why learn about design thinking, and critical and creative thinking?
Reference: https://www.education.nsw.gov.au/content/dam/main-education/teaching-and-learning/education-for-a-changing-world/media/documents/Future_EDge_Issue_1.pdf
AI is here. It is all around us as we use the internet, hail taxis, check our smart watches or set the many devices in our homes to function in our absence. Whether it ultimately becomes a blessing or a curse for humanity remains to be seen. It will depend on how we understand its power and potential.
Using design thinking and critical and creative thinking, we can understand the power and potential for AI.
Here are some other reasons why we need design thinking and CCT:
Can you think of others?Use this graph to ask a who, what, where, when, how or why question.
Without action, the next generation will be unprepared for the needs of the future, creating risks for both productivity and social cohesion. There is an opportunity for public and private sector leaders to reset primary and secondary education systems, and co-design content and delivery that deliver on children’s needs for the future. |
Design thinking: Where did it come from?
Design thinking has been used as an approach since the 1960s, and in the last fifty years, it has helped create many of the daily appliances, tools and techniques that we are use. It really is an 'umbrella term' for "multi-disciplinary, human-centered projects that involve research and rapid ideation (idea generation)".
Click on the timeline below to go to "Design thinking origin story plus some of the people who made it all happen" by Jo Szczepanska (Jan 4, 2017). You can read about some significant people who have changed the world with design thinking.
Click on the timeline below to go to "Design thinking origin story plus some of the people who made it all happen" by Jo Szczepanska (Jan 4, 2017). You can read about some significant people who have changed the world with design thinking.
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But what is it?
You use design thinking in STEM to build solutions and problem-solve when you are working with others. Try this challenge and see if you can work out how you used design thinking to meet the challenge.
Draw Toast
Step 1: Prepare
Grab some markers, paper, sticky notes or index cards. Step 2: Invite Work with others Step 3: Conduct Draw a picture of how to make toast in 2-3 minutes. |
Step 4: Reflect
Hold up your drawing. Step 5: Improve Make it better with others. Step 6: Reflect again. Listen to parts of Tom Wujec's Talk about drawing toast. How would you describe your approach? |
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How many nodes did you have?
How did you break down this complex task?
Did you leave anything out?
Turn and talk to a trusted partner about how you approached this 'easy' task. Discuss what you changed and why and how you used design thinking to meet the challenge.
You might like to check out the Gallery of Drawings in the link below and see how other people were able to 'draw toast'!
The L-A-U-N-C-H cycle gave you a step-by-step process to work together. Head back to the Design Thinking tab on the Lumen STEM website to review the steps.
You might like to check out the Gallery of Drawings in the link below and see how other people were able to 'draw toast'!
The L-A-U-N-C-H cycle gave you a step-by-step process to work together. Head back to the Design Thinking tab on the Lumen STEM website to review the steps.
Definition of design thinking
Here are three definitions for design thinking. Read them all and then write your own definition in the padlet below.
Use of strategies for understanding design problems and opportunities, visualising and generating creative and innovative ideas, and analysing and evaluating those ideas that best meet the criteria for success and planning.
-Australian Curriculum
Design thinking can be basically summed up by collaboration, insight, problem solving, building and testing based on human-centered design.
- Lillian Ayla Ersoy
Design thinking has an amalgamation of approaches, which makes it unique – they may be why – design thinking is applied as an umbrella term for multi-disciplinary, human-centered projects that involve research and rapid ideation (idea generation).
- Jo Szczepanska
Now try this:
Developing thinking skills
We need to think creatively about how new technology like AI might be useful to us. When developing and operating AI, we need to think critically about how well it serves its purpose and what the ethical implications might be. It helps us when we use metacognitive skills, "thinking about thinking", but how do we do this? We can think about two types of thinking we hear about all the time: creative thinking and critical thinking.
Creative thinking
Creative thinking involves students learning to generate and apply new ideas in specific contexts, seeing existing situations in a new way, identifying alternative explanations, and seeing or making new links that generate a positive outcome. This includes combining parts to form something original, sifting and refining ideas to discover possibilities, constructing theories and objects, and acting on intuition. The products of creative endeavour can involve complex representations and images, investigations and performances, digital and computer-generated output, or occur as virtual reality. |
What could this look like?
The narrator urges us to "do one thing you have never done before every day for at least one week, maybe a month. Call your weird aunt, talk to a stranger, eat using your left hand, or take a really really cold shower. Every evening write down what you did and what you’ve learned from it. Start with the first new thing right now".
What will you do? How will this help you become more creative?
Great inventors such as Leonardo da Vinci have shown us the way. Read about the qualities of creativity associated with creative scientists.
Leonardo da Vinci designed weapons and aircraft, in some cases, hundreds of years before they would be built. Robert Stephenson designed and built locomotives which could pull the heaviest loads over long distances.
It could be argued that creativity is only the privilege of leaders, but this isn’t true. Tang and Kaufmann (2015) believe that creativity is critical to performance in science and engineering. In their research, they identified four factors associated with creative scientists:
1. personality (e.g. kind, friendly, dedicated)
2. thinking ability (e.g. broad thinking, active thinking, deep thought)
3. research ability (e.g. diligent, exploring, concentrating), and
4. uniqueness (e.g. odd, insist on own opinion, paranoid).
Later, they showed that the most creative scientists were distinguished by characteristics of thinking while the least creative were most associated with personality attributes [from Tang, C. and Kaufmann, J. (2015) The Journal of Creative Behaviour. 51 (3), 204-215].
It could be argued that creativity is only the privilege of leaders, but this isn’t true. Tang and Kaufmann (2015) believe that creativity is critical to performance in science and engineering. In their research, they identified four factors associated with creative scientists:
1. personality (e.g. kind, friendly, dedicated)
2. thinking ability (e.g. broad thinking, active thinking, deep thought)
3. research ability (e.g. diligent, exploring, concentrating), and
4. uniqueness (e.g. odd, insist on own opinion, paranoid).
Later, they showed that the most creative scientists were distinguished by characteristics of thinking while the least creative were most associated with personality attributes [from Tang, C. and Kaufmann, J. (2015) The Journal of Creative Behaviour. 51 (3), 204-215].
Critical thinking
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Every day, a sea of decisions stretches before us, and it’s impossible to make a perfect choice every time. But there are many ways to improve our chances — and one particularly effective technique is critical thinking. Samantha Agoos describes a 5-step process that may help you with any number of problems.
Use this TED-Ed lesson to:
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Divergent and convergent thinking
Divergent and convergent thinking approaches relate to creative and critical thinking. You need to use these in different situations and be able to switch between them as the needs change. It helps you become adaptive so that you can change up the solutions and problem-solve quickly and efficiently. It also helps you keep pace when you've got a lot of things you need to get done or you need to help someone who is struggling with too much to do. These thinking approaches aren't just about STEM, they are about becoming independent and taking on more responsibilities, and being a good friend and helping people when they need you.
Watch this clip and then join a classroom discussion about when you used divergent thinking or convergent thinking in the last week. You'll be surprised at the responses!
Watch this clip and then join a classroom discussion about when you used divergent thinking or convergent thinking in the last week. You'll be surprised at the responses!
Using critical and creative thinking
These thinking skills help us ask important questions. When we're launching an inquiry or starting to generate ideas using AI, we might ask:
- What current or emerging challenges do we face in our school, community, or at a global level?
- Which part of the challenge can we realistically tackle?
- What is an important problem that doesn't yet have any good solutions?
- What is the nature of the problem? What don't we yet understand about it? To date, what have been the shortcomings of any attempted solutions?
- What data is required for the AI to help solve the problem?
- How available is the required data?
- What is the quality of the available data?
- What can be done to improve data availability and quality?
- How many ways can we frame this problem?
- Which way of framing the problem is best?
- Without restraint or constraint, how many different solutions to the problem can we think of?
- Who else can we invite to think about this problem?
In continuing to use our critical and creative thinking, you would move onto analysing and reflecting. These questions might come up:
- How effective is our AI solution? What might be the solution's unintended consequences? What down sides, if any, are associated with the solution? Is it an improvement over other ways of tackling the problem? Is the solution feasible? What will it take to implement it: resources, time frame, collaboration (or competition)?
- Does the data and model provide decisions or inferences of sufficient accuracy? How can the model's accuracy be improved?
- What happens when the AI makes a mistake?
- What happens if the system goes down? How is it protected from corruption and sabotage?
- Do we understand the problem enough?
- Have we imagined the solution well?
- What has been our progress in finding and developing a solution?
- Is the solution acceptable to those for whom it has been developed?
- What about the attitudes of other stakeholders?
- How do we respond to criticism?
Deep Blue v Kasparov
Who really won?
IBM's Deep Blue made some moves that seemed unexpected, but where they? Did Deep Blue use critical and creative thinking?
Watch this and decide for yourself.
Watch this and decide for yourself.
Deep Blue's programmers used their creative and critical thinking skills to feed into the program a winning combination that left Kasparov devastated. We need these skills to keep improving AI's capabilities. The CSIRO are doing just that.
Using CCT in everyday ways
The CSIRO are helping Roads and Maritime Services NSW to maximise the service life of the Sydney Harbour Bridge road deck without significant increase in expenditure using AI. They have developed structural health monitoring technology so that maintenance can be scheduled when it's needed based on the condition of the bridge. It means less interruptions to commuters using the Harbour Bridge.
By implementing a monitoring system using 2400 sensors to collect information on the condition of the road, and using machine-learning based predictive analytics, we're able to continuously assess the data we collect and provide an early warning of problems before bridge users are affected. Discover how CSIRO is using AI in the Amazon Rainforest, improving crop yields, and even helping us protect the Great Barrier Reef from climate change, poor water quality from land‑based run-off, and impacts from coastal development.
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