4.2.1 Description of the course
Participants are assisted in deepening their knowledge and skills to conduct research. Moreover, encouraging students to use technological tools promotes the internalization of concepts and develops the understanding of research methods, such as formulating a precise question or monitoring a research skill.
Research-based learning enhances student capacity to deal with uncertainty. It promotes independence, teamwork and organizational skills. It encourages students to be thoughtful, motivated, collaborative, and innovative, capable of engaging in their own inquiries and thriving in a world of constant change.
The course aims at theoretical and practical deepening. The course aims at building student skills on performing research, including formulating and defining a question, planning research activities and specifying methods and tools, undertaking investigations, analyzing and interpreting data, reporting and presenting results, implementing, guiding the inquiry process, understanding the analogies between creative processes in artwork production and research, discovering, reasoning and thinking, and understanding the difference between real and virtual experiments. Students work in groups on practical exercises.
Design thinking was integrated into this training due to its formal method of solution-focused thinking. It starts with a goal and explores multiple alternative solutions simultaneously, as in the research process. This method reveals its efficiency mainly in investigating ill-defined problems where many factors may be unknown. This can be useful, particularly in open research investigation and qualitative research.
4.2.2 Description of the participants
For this training, the ICT-INOV methodology was deployed in the 2021 – 2022 academic year. Students aged between 22-30 years old were engaged in the course managed by the research center, EU-Track.
4.2.3 Description of gamified design thinking activities
Design thinking was integrated into the course to help students develop a deep contextual understanding of users via non-numerical means and direct observations that highlight attitudes, behavior, and latent needs. The purpose of design thinking deployment was to achieve a more effective needs analysis. Activities were organized in the following steps.
Step 1: Team building.
Students were divided into 4 teams constituted of 5 members. They were invited to select a team name and to identify the main features of the team including their purposes. They used a team canvas template to carry out this task. The principal objective was to define the team roles and skills, values, rules of collaboration, and goals to start their design thinking process.4
Step 2: Understanding the problem and the users and empathy map.
Students collected data on how users think and feel. Unlike quantitative research, this qualitative approach helped students understand users’ motivations, hopes, needs, pain points, and more. This rigorous user analysis work contributed to eliminating design errors in the implementation phase.
Moreover, they conducted interviews to analyze user needs. The interviews included a set of clear, predefined questions of the form “how much” or “how many” that could be answered with a “yes”, “no”, “never”, “twice a week”, or similar responses.
The achieved results of this process were rich, detailed insights into users’ feelings and thinking. The gathered data was unstructured, in the form of notes, drawings, or pictures, which students organized in an empathy map. The method provided deep insights, and the students, who worked as designers, gained a better understanding of the research topic in focus. Even though students did not know exactly what to look for initially, they solved the context.
Step 3: Problem define.
Students were invited to be specific in the definition of the problem to be resolved through design thinking. They defined the problem using a clause of the form “who”, “what”, and “why” which allowed a clear description of user needs.
Through this method, students gained deep insights and better understanding of the researched topic and the context in which they operate through a holistic approach belonging to the ICT-INOV methodology implementation.
Step 4: Brainstorming and ideate.
Students generated a rich pool of ideas to identify the final solution to be proposed by combing technology and the different ways to construct an effective organizational social model based on sustainable development, focused in this case on renewable energy communities and energy transition.
Step 5: Prototype and design.
Students built the proposed solution prototype by using a poster template to present the action plan focused on different aspects of the renewable energy communities and energy transition.
