2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Design thinking and rapid prototyping can be used to engage high school students and get them excited about pursuing a career in engineering. Engineering educators and a librarian at the University of Nevada, Reno, collaborated to explore this concept and develop a makerspace activity that emphasized creative problem-solving and hands-on learning experiences designed to engage the students in an iterative design process with real-world applications.
Each summer, the College of Engineering hosts various weeklong camps for middle and high school students with a particular theme or engineering focus. During the summer of 2023, the University of Nevada, Reno makerspace supported this program by hosting several design thinking and rapid prototyping sessions to accompany the already robust camp curriculum.
Over the course of three 1-hour sessions, students worked in small groups to explore human-centered design principles and fabricate a prototype. The first session was an introduction to the design thinking process and the tools available in the makerspace. Each team explored the theme of accessibility in the outdoors, and went through an abridged version of the first three steps of the design thinking process. By the end of this session, they had defined a problem and determined one solution from a structured brainstorming session. The second session was dedicated to fabrication of their solution using makerspace equipment, with help from makerspace staff members. During the third session, students received feedback from another group and had the opportunity to revise their designs before they presented the final product at the summer camp open house at the end of the week.
This paper will discuss the collaboration between the College of Engineering and the makerspace librarian, as well as detailed information on the goals of the project, the design thinking curriculum, session facilitation, and lessons learned. This will provide a useful guide for other institutions that are interested in incorporating design thinking or rapid prototyping into their K-12 engineering outreach efforts.