Design Thinking in BIOSHIELD Curriculum
Educational technology improves how knowledge reaches students. Design thinking determines what they then do with it. BIOSHIELD defines it as a problem-solving approach that teams use to understand and redefine problems, challenge assumptions and create innovative solutions to prototype and test, and it requires the curriculum to follow the five stages of empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test. The stated goal is to give students the foresight to apply their knowledge and skills in their future professional settings before they formally begin their careers.
Design thinking is important for this curriculum for five reasons.
- It starts from real problems. Climate change presents open, systemic problems with many stakeholders. In the empathise and define stages students interview farmers, take stakeholder roles and frame the question themselves, instead of receiving a ready-made exercise.
- It makes research idea creation and laboratory work purposeful. Students enter the laboratory to build and test their own prototype, so techniques are learned as means to an end. The project target is that 90% of student groups develop a prototype.
- It builds transversal skills. Teamwork, communication, creativity and data-based decisions are practised in every stage; the project aims for 80% of students to improve these skills.
- It connects students with industry. Industry representatives help choose the ideas to prototype, open their laboratories and give feedback, and students present results at the biotechnology fairs. Interested companies may offer early contracts.
- It supports entrepreneurship. Testing whether a prototype is useful and marketable prepares students for start-ups; at least 40% of participants are expected to express an intention to start a business.
4.1 The five stages in the curriculum
| Stage | What students do | Proposed examples for the curriculum modules |
|---|---|---|
| Empathise | Understand the problem and the people or systems it affects |
Module 3: teams interview farmers, scientists or land managers about soil microbiomes. Module 2: role-play of food-system stakeholders facing a disruption. |
| Define | Reduce what they learned to one clear, workable problem | Module 1: each group selects one key scientific problem in cultured meat production, such as reducing reliance on fetal bovine serum. |
| Ideate | Generate many ideas, then select and plan the strongest | Module 2: sticky-note sessions on alternative protein sources, followed by a project proposal with objectives, methods and impact. |
| Prototype | Build a first working version in the laboratory or on screen |
Module 1: pilot-scale starter culture production on food and agro-waste. Module 3: a pot experiment with microbial inoculants, or an interactive GIS map. |
| Test | Present, collect feedback and refine | Module 3: another team tests the map for clarity and each team gives a two-minute investor-style pitch; final presentation to an invited expert. |
On smaller screens, scroll horizontally to view all three columns.
The two approaches depend on each other. The empathise stage is also the first step of flipped learning, because students meet the industrial problem through the video tutorials before class. The technology supplies the knowledge at the right moment; design thinking gives that knowledge a use.