Getting started in MYP Design? Need a few short and helpful videos to support or direct your students’ human-centered, problem-solving thinking? You may be beginning a project-based STEAM lesson and need to prime your students into design thinking mode.
Actually, there are more than five videos about design and the design process. Enjoy!
Why Use Short Videos?
Human learning theory suggests that using short videos in lessons with students can be an effective instructional strategy. Teachers know this intuitively. I try to keep instructional videos under four minutes, and YouTube can filter for this length.
Of course, the effectiveness of a short-video strategy depends on how it is designed and implemented. One essential theory that applies to short videos is the Cognitive Load Theory. The amount of information we present to our students should be carefully thought out and managed.
Another helpful theory to remember is the Social Cognitive Theory, which emphasizes the importance of observation and modeling in learning. Short videos provide opportunities for students to observe real-world examples, demonstrations, and simulations of concepts or skills, which can help them to understand and apply the knowledge in context. Product sketching and digital designing Tinkercad use come to mind.
Design Thinking Videos
Check out the following five short design videos for your students. I have shown most of these videos multiple times to prepare and support my MYP Design classes. Their use has helped my students demonstrate a substantial interest and engagement with the content.
These videos offer multiple perspectives on design thinking and range from about three to eight minutes long.
Enjoy the messy design process!
If you’re seeing this I finished the project
Author: makethingwithhand
Length: 8:06
Date: October 30, 2024
How do you make an ideal real? The video explains how creative ideas take shape! It focuses on the steps involved in turning an idea into a finished product. Enjoy the journey of design thinking!
Creativity and Design Thinking
This video frames creativity as a step-by-step journey. It shows how creators begin with rough, unrefined ideas and improve them through exploration and practice. A tolerance for ambiguity is beneficial! This focus on gradual progress reflects the iterative nature of design thinking, where each step eventually builds on previous insights.
Empathy and Observation in Design
The creator, makethingwithhand, starts by reflecting on their drive to create something meaningful. They observe challenges and think critically about potential solutions. This foundation stage is similar to the empathy stage in design thinking, where designers focus on understanding the needs of others to define problems more clearly.
From Ideation to Execution
The video emphasizes the importance of brainstorming, experimentation, and persistence. It shows how creators generate multiple ideas, refine them, and remove what doesn’t work. Can you say MYP Design process? This journey mirrors the ideation and prototyping phases of design thinking, where trial and error leads to and better and better outcomes. Enjoy the ride!
Focused and Diffused Thinking: The Ping Pong Technique
Author: Sprouts
Length: 2:52
Date: May 24, 2015
Sprouts makes animated videos about education, learning, science, and creative and critical thinking.
This video uses sketchnoting techniques to illustrate the two types of thinking (focused and relaxed) to solve problems. One astute YouTube commentator remarked that basically, we need to take breaks from what we are doing–you know, our work. I like seeing this common-sense advice from another perspective. It gets me thinking…
Some possible MYP Design questions: How can the MYP Design Cycle promote focused and diffused thinking to solve problems? Should it? In which criteria or strands would a focused or relaxed approach best apply?
How to Solve Problems Like a Designer
Author: Vox
Length: 4:50
Date: September 21, 2017
Updated October 18, 2022. I initially cited a video by LinkedIn Learning called User Experience Tutorial: Fitts’s Law Logical Physical Design of Items, but they have since made it private.
Another visually fun video I used with my students about the design process centers on IDEO, a company that went from making products to making experiences. Tim Brown, IDEO’s Chair and co-CEO, goes into the design process and begins by asking interesting questions about the world around us.
Usually, these are “why” questions that focus on human struggles and how to eliminate or reduce those struggles with good design. There’s a focus on gathering lots of feedback about a problem before ideation and prototyping.
Why Design Matters
Author: The School of Life
Length: 3:42
Date: June 22, 2015
The School of Life is a global organization based in London. Their general goal is to help people lead more fulfilling lives. They go about this in their videos by exploring the deep questions that involve human emotion and our psychological lives.
This video is made up of cleverly animated photos narrated by a compelling voice. The speaker argues that design matters because it affects how we as people feel and relate to each other. What I have remarked to my students is that designers tend to have a lot of strong opinions and this video follows suit!
What about the narrator’s assertion that “good design helps us be the best versions of ourselves”? Do you agree with the author? Did the Catholics design better churches than the Protestants in terms of all of the elements of design?
The Design Thinking Process
Author: Sprouts
Length: 3:56
Date: October 23, 2017
Sketnoting is used once more to describe a five-step process to solve a problem for an identified audience. Also, there is mention of Stanford’s d.school which offers a free virtual crash course to guide participants through a full human-centered design thinking cycle. There are multiple educational resources in many languages with the course!
How is the five-step design thinking process in the video most similar to or most different from the MYP Design Cycle (which has four steps/criteria)?
Learning Graphic Facilitation – 7 Elements by Bigger Picture
Author: Bigger Picture Video
Length: 4:26
Date: April 5, 2013
Bigger Picture is a strategy, learning, and design agency based in Denmark. They use an approach called System Visualization to process complexity to be more manageable.
I think I’ve shown this short video the most to my students. I’m still intrigued and motivated to sketch better for my students to communicate ideas and concepts. Sketchnoting is used to show how simple sketches, symbols, and text can create powerful visuals.
The vibe seems to be how to communicate big with a little, and these techniques can apply students as they are engaged in design thinking. The minimal use of color I find especially helpful with 11- and 12-year olds who can tend to overcolor sketches.
Some questions to use with your students may be: What do the different arrows represent in Element 3, Process? What do the different arrows represent in Element 4, Speech? Why is less actually more for visual presentations? Empathy question: In Element 7, what are the five people feeling (bottom right, at about 3:05 in the video)?
Understanding Design Thinking
Consider using the questions I wrote for each video, have students develop their own, or ask students to simply reflect on these resources. Some summary questions could be: How are you already using these thinking techniques to solve problems in your life? Which academic subject areas benefit most from design thinking? What did you learn in the videos to help your problem-solving abilities?
For a 20-minute task, select maybe one to two videos to review. Students could generate one reflective response or answer one to two questions.
If you are in a digital learning and teaching context, consider using a Google Form to capture your student’s written work. A collection of student text responses allows you quick access to their work in one place for evaluation.
You can also create a tag cloud to summarize the responses with a free online service like WordClouds.com. Share the tag cloud for additional discussion with your students.
Design Thinking Videos Summary
These helpful design thinking videos for students can be effective for comprehension because they deliver information in manageable chunks that can be processed and integrated into existing knowledge more efficiently.
Students can use these short videos to learn about the design process and gain inspiration for their STEM, STEAM, and MYP Design projects. Additionally, they can use the short videos to learn about different design-thinking methods and STEM tools and their application in real-world situations.
Videos help start a class on the right track and facilitate group discussions and brainstorming sessions. With the right questions, the videos can foster critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
Videos can be beneficial in subjects like MYP Design that can be abstract or difficult to visualize, such as learning 3D modeling with Tinkercad or product sketching.
Finally, students can reference the design thinking videos to learn about different industries and careers that benefit from design thinking. Some examples are product design, user experience design (UX), and service design. When I was at the American School of Lima, the high school offered a food design class!