Fred Estes on Teaching and Writing

From Teaching to Writing

Design Thinking: Empowering Students to Innovate and Create Change

by Fred Estes

Discovering why I needed to write

“I just can’t do science!”

My student’s words haunted me. She absolutely could do science—she just lacked confidence. Her comment galvanized me to find ways to inspire all my students. I didn’t need them all to become scientists, but I wanted them all to see themselves as capable of understanding science. STEM is a possible path. More importantly, they will all be making decisions about how our society uses technology, from climate policy to artificial intelligence. Science isn’t just for scientists; it’s for all of us shaping our shared future.

During this search, I discovered a TED talk by a 15-year-old who had developed an early test for pancreatic cancer. It wasn’t just his age but how he applied many of the same fundamental science concepts we were studying. Viewing this video with my class sparked a lively discussion about what they wanted to learn and how they might apply science to real-world problems.

Energized, I searched for more stories of young innovators to share with my class. I found many biographies of long-dead European male scientists—but nothing reflecting my diverse students. Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” So, I began writing before school each morning. Those bleary morning drafts became my first book, Teen Innovators: Nine Young People Engineering a Better World with Creative Inventions (Lerner, 2022). These stories showed how young people like my students can use science to change the world.

An Insight

While writing about young inventors, I noticed they naturally applied principles similar to design thinking—a creative problem-solving method I teach my students. My first thought was to add a chapter summarizing design thinking at the end of the book. My editor at Lerner Books suggested expanding my brief chapter on design thinking into a full guide. This idea led to Design Thinking: A Guide to Innovation (Lerner, 2025), which adapts this powerful approach for students and teachers.

Why Teach the Design Thinking Process?

Design thinking is especially useful for tackling complex, messy problems that people encounter daily. These challenges often require a clearer definition, deeper insights, and creative, collaborative approaches.  When humans are part of the problem, empathy must be part of the solution. This differs from technical problem-solving, where even difficult tasks follow a known set of steps, such as developing a new antibiotic, engineering a GPS, or improving semiconductor manufacturing.

The big global challenges like homelessness, worldwide pandemics, and climate change require design thinking to solve.  They don’t have straightforward, technical answers, and human behavior is embedded in the problem. Our students can use design thinking now to address local aspects of these challenges in their schools and communities.

My book describes students creating assistive devices, accessibility tools, and other significant innovations. By practicing design thinking now, students build the skills they’ll need to approach these complex international issues with creativity, empathy, and problem-solving confidence.

My guidebook covers a step-by-step process with examples and invites students and teachers to re-think traditional projects by:

• solving genuine problems in partnership with people in your classroom or community,
• practicing continuous improvement with multiple rounds of feedback and revision,
• seeing themselves as creative, capable problem-solvers.

These process steps are:

1. Notice and Reflect: Examining your motivation and connection to the challenge
2. Empathy and Understanding: Deeply comprehending community needs
3. Problem Definition: Creating action-oriented specifications
4. Ideation: Generating multiple possible solutions
5. Prototyping: Building models of potential solutions
6. Testing: Working with community partners to evaluate and improve

Note that while design thinking starts with people and centers on their needs, designers move back and forth among the steps as the situation indicates.

Design Thinking in Action

My book research led me to Javier’s story. Javier is blind and he had a problem common among many blind people. When walking along the street or in open spaces, he would often veer off-course as he did not have the visual cues that help people keep on track. Veering can be very dangerous. Javier tells of walking along the sidewalk and suddenly finding himself in the middle of the street with cars honking and swerving around him. Alarmed, he wondered how he could walk safely. Then he met a team of design thinking students looking for a community partner. They realized they could help each other.

They worked together through the steps of the design thinking process. The students immersed themselves in learning about blindness and the challenges faced by blind people. Using this foundational knowledge, Javier and the students decided to tackle veering as an issue. After carefully defining the problem, they brainstormed many possible solutions. Finally, the team decided on a wearable device to help avoid veering. This device consisted of a belt equipped with microelectronic sensors to detect when the blind person was veering. The sensors activated small vibrating motors on the sides of the belt, indicating the wearer needed to turn. They prototyped many variations and finally arrived at a belt design that worked for Javier. Thanks to these students, Javier now walks the streets with confidence.

Design thinking is a very flexible framework. It can work differently across grade levels, subject areas, as well as students’ interests and skill levels. For example, when my first-grade colleague Emily runs her holiday gift project, she goes beyond having her students make traditional pre-planned presents. They interview family members, create multiple prototypes, and learn to empathize with the needs of others.

Two other teaching friends use design thinking in their second-grade Ancestors unit, which explores family history and culture. They focus on the research and exploration phases of the process. Their students learn about and re-create artifacts and ceremonies, appropriate to the culture of their families. The unit culminates in a collective display of students’ family history and heritage shared during a family night.

In middle school science, I wrap up a unit on electricity with students using microelectronic components. Each team designs and creates a device of their own invention to solve a problem of daily living. We all have fun with their hilarious gizmos! Design thinking scales up from simpler projects to more complex challenges as students learn how to tackle increasingly difficult personal, school, and community issues. 

My teaching experience shows me that students are capable of far more than we often expect. When we give them real problems to solve and trust in their abilities, they consistently amaze themselves and us. To get started:

• Choose relevant challenges connected to students’ interests
• Encourage empathy through observation and interviews
• Frame goals as questions such as “How might we…?”
• Create judgment-free spaces for brainstorming
• Use simple materials for prototyping
• Gather feedback and refine solutions
• Reflect on the process

The key is starting small and building gradually—what the Institute for Inquiry calls “subtle shifts.”

Through writing and teaching, I see how design thinking can change students from passive learners into active problem-solvers. When students see themselves as innovators capable of creating change, they rise to meet the challenge. Innovative educator A.J. Juliani says, “Our job is not to prepare students for something. Our job is to help students prepare themselves for anything.” Design Thinking isn’t just about solving problems—it’s about building confident, creative thinkers who believe in their power to make a difference.