Story Inspired Design Practice!

August 2025

Our design team wants students to get comfortable with design thinking and the design cycle. Design thinking is human-centered problem solving with steps that can loop: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test. Design thinking values iteration or repetition to improve a design. The design cycle is a more linear creative process: plan, develop, create, evaluate. The design cycle overlaps with ideation, prototyping, and testing. 

Practicing design thinking and the design cycle encourages a growth mindset. Risk, reflection, and fun are part of learning and creating. Elementary design teacher Cassidy Carvalho used two books to explore the design cycle, “Go Away, Big Green Monster” by Ed Emberley and “The Most Magnificent Thing” by Ashley Spires. 

Kindergarten design students took a cue from Emberley’s illustrations to design their own monsters. They imagined their own monster face, created a plan using shapes and labeling colors. Then they followed their design, cutting the shapes from colored paper before gluing their monster face in place. After, it was easy for kindergarteners to see where they followed or modified their original design and reflect on their creative choices.

Ms. Carvalho started her second grade class with a prompt. “Imagine a rocket ship,” she said. Then she showed a picture of a rocket ship, asked students to raise their hands if their rocket ship looked like that one. She showed another picture. “What about this one?” she asked. She pointed to her head and wondered how we take the idea in here and make it in the world. Ms. Carvalho also wanted her second graders to consider how we all have imaginations that work in different ways.

“The Most Magnificent Thing” is about just that – making an idea into a thing. In the story, a girl and her dog are co-creators of an invention but the girl’s frustration is that she can’t explain what she needs to make her invention match the idea in her mind. Ms. Carvalho grouped students to challenge them to make their own most magnificent thing. The process focused on communication. Ms. Carvalho and her teaching assistant, Edna Chung, encouraged groups to work together to bring everyone’s ideas into one creation. Second graders had to describe their invention to each other and talk through each step of the design. 

Design activities like these encourage planning and adapting, collaboration and feedback, and exploration of each stage in the design process. Ms. Carvalho used the following steps to guide her design students:

• Understand: what are you going to make? 
• Imagine: what will it look like? 
• Plan: draw and label a sketch, list materials you need
• Create: build your design! 
• Test: did you follow or change your plan, did it work?

Bring the design process into your family’s next creative project!