Sketchup & Miro - Desing Thinking

The apps

SketchUp is a 3D software for designing digital models of various objects, buildings, and landscapes. It is an excellent program for designing small objects for 3D impressions. Web pages like Thingiverse show the multiple applications 3D design in programs like SketchUp can have for solving everyday needs.

Photo holder for desk design by Álvaro Pérez

Miro is a collaborative online whiteboard platform used in the creative industry for brianstornimin, project planning, and design thinking. The app provides a flexible and intuitive canvas where users can create visual materials, including sticky notes, diagrams, flowcharts, and more. The best thing about Miro is its wide variety of templates, which help teams and individual users start using frames for project planning.

Using SketchUp and Miro for fostering Creativity

Under the view of problem-based learning, apps like SkethUp and Miro can easily be used by teachers to guide students in design while developing creative skills and covering academic content. Considering that having the students participate in meaningful tasks related to community needs is a way of nurturing creativity (Beghetto & James; 2013), SkectUp could be used to design objects that are 3D printed for tackling specific needs in the scholar community.

Coat Hoak by 2_black_cats on Thingiverse

Pot by diegoinsalopez on Thingiverse

Designing coat hooks for the classroom or pots for the orchard could be the product of projects that solve community problems.

Along the same line, knowing the importance of explicitly teaching creative thinking and clarifying constraints and expectations for fostering creativity (Beghetto & James, 2014), guiding the students on following a framework for design projects such as the one proposed by IDEO (2012) results ideal. IDEO proposes a process of 5 steps that go from identifying a design to finding and building a solution: discovery, interpretation, ideation, experimentation, and evolution. By designing templates in Miro, the teacher can guide the students over the steps of the framework in a visual, structured, and at the same time, flexible way.

Example of Work Frame based on Lighting Decision Jam (LDJ)

Limitations

Added to the common complications that working under problem-based learning has, such as organization with different community stakeholders and connecting the project with contents of different projects, SketchUp and Miro need certain training. Any of the programs are complicated to use, but for the students and teachers to take advantage of them, they will need to use them multiple times. Both tools can be used for free under certain limitations.

References:

Beghetto, R. A., & Kaufman, J. C. (2014). Classroom contexts for creativity. High Ability Studies, 25(1), 53–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/13598139.2014.905247

Beghetto, R. A., & Kaufman, J. C. (2013). Fundamentals of Creativity. Educational Leadership, 70(5), 10-15.

IDEO (2012). Design Thinking for Educators (2nd Edition).