Ignorance of the usefulness of technology makes it challenging to apply innovative strategies in the classroom, accompanied by a thought that educational technology is about introducing more technological devices to the school, and not how to use technological tools for the scope of the teaching/learning process. To these problems, a time circumstance is added since teachers need enough time to update themselves. In recent years some new trends have been emerging and have taken more strength in innovation, fostering new forms of teaching. Their intention in educational centers is to prepare students for a new type of society, which is the information society. For this reason, this work proposes the use of the design thinking methodology for the development of a mobile application, efficient and usable for teaching kinematics, obtaining a favorable result given to the acceptance of a sample of fifth-year students from a high school.
Today, the work of innovation and digital change is not a simple task for the
teaching staff of schools. The misuse of technology makes it difficult to
implement innovative strategies in the classroom. There is a misconception that
educational technology is just introducing many technological devices to school,
not on how to use technological tools adequately in the field of teaching and
learning. Added to this problem is time, given that teachers need time to learn,
explore, dominate, and put it into practice. Innovation in educational
technology (EdTech) not only refers to the use of tools but also to pedagogy, teaching,
strategies, processes, resources, and talent development [
In recent years, new trends have gained more strength in innovation and
promoting new ways of teaching. The intention is to apply them in schools and
to prepare students for a new kind of society, the society information, not only
seeking to teach the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)
but looking for new learning tools to meet the unique educational challenges.
Design Thinking is an analytical and creative process that involves a group of
people from different fields to generate innovative ideas. The focus is mainly
on the user experience, modeling, and construction, with emphasis on the most
critical part of the implementation of the model. We refer to the redesign,
to detect problems and needs, and to find a quick and useful solution[
The complexity is identified as a problem in the stage of digital transformation in regular primary education, which presents various challenges as a time circumstance, so that a teacher can adapt, and a slow process of adaptability to generate innovative ideas quickly and efficiently, in this case, in the process of ideation and development of the interfaces of the mobile application for teaching kinematics. 2.2
The objective of this research is to propose a viable and efficient interface for the student to support the teaching-learning process of the kinematic course and redesign fast and efficient using design thinking, which is expected to achieve that through the use Design Thinking to able to respond quickly to the needs of users with a usable interface, friendly and efficient for students. 2.3
Design is a process that converts a requirement into a finished product or a
design solution, this process mostly includes creativity, but is controlled and
marked by the process so that a simple solution to the problem that meets the
established considerations is achieved. The design process is essential to produce
several possible solutions and uses several techniques that encourage designers
to generate creative and innovative solutions [
In recent years, several organizations and individuals have discovered the
power of design thinking by creating products with innovation. Design thinking
is an implicit activity in the design process and can change the way we work,
changing the way we think, solve problems and develop products and services
[
Design Thinking mainly focuses on the needs of the people who will consume
the product and takes into account the perspective of various stakeholders [
The Stanford model is composed of five phases or stages of Design Thinking;
all stages are indispensable, and these are, empathize, define, devise, create
prototyping, and testing. These phases are not linear and will iterate in the process
[
Design Thinking, according to Brown [
Due to the fast and competitive market of mobile applications, it is necessary
to have new skills to be able to design effective solutions; Design Thinking can
supplement these skills that are necessary in the process of design and
development of mobile applications [
In Valentim’s work [
The case study in the subject of Kinematics is a branch of physics that studies
the movement of solid objects and their trajectory as a function of time, without
taking into account the origin of the forces that motivate [
The proposal will be developed at the Antonio Jos´e de Sucre Educational Institution by agreement with the National University of San Agust´ın. The working group will be a subset of 24 students between 15 and 18 years of the 5th year of secondary level studies.
Design thinking process Design Thinking methodology focuses on the rapid
creation of a prototype, which is to generate ideas and turn them into real
products that will then be tested, iterated and refined with the comments provided
by interested parties [
The design process of the mobile application was carried out following the
non-linear stages or phases of Design Thinking proposed by Brown and
Wyatt [
Phase 1 Inspiration: This phase focused on understanding the current situation the needs and challenges of end users in a normal physics lab session. Together with the physics laboratory teacher of the educational institution and the observation, the aim was to understand the problems encountered when dictating a laboratory session. A personal interview was conducted with the theoretical physics professor in order to know the specific content that dictates in his course and perform the validation of the data collected in workshop 1. The pedagogical team together with the development team elaborated a survey that we carried out to 70 final students with the objective to gather information of their knowledge of mobile applications and interest to learn with them and to know their attitude towards the technology, the survey also included questions related to the demography and had an approximate duration of 2 hours distributed in 3 groups. The data collection focused on three themes: the current situation in which the physics course is being conducted, the students’ interest in learning with technology, and technological knowledge and preparation.
Phase 2 Ideation: In this phase the collected data will be analysed and
transformed into innovative ideas for change [
Phase 3 Implementation: In this phase the prototype of the mobile
application was tested on intelligent cell phones, a workshop was held at the educational
institution together with part of the pedagogical team, the development team
and students of the educational institution, the prototypes were tested on a total
of twenty-four students in a period of twenty-five minutes, this test was intended
to explore the experiences of users with the prototype in practice, information
was collected from this test through observation. After testing the prototypes on
smart phones, a survey was taken that focused on the student’s experience with
the prototype using usability questions of these, in order to collect information
from the point of view of end users. The results of the practical test and the
survey were used to create a list of recommended settings for the application
prototypes. In Fig.1, it is possible to observe evidence in the ideation process of
the mobile application, captured in low fidelity prototypes(wireframes ).
Application prototype After the previous processes, the experience gathered,
a first interface was proposed, based on the expert judgment by the research team
and a series of interviews that were conducted with the teachers of the school,
this first interface proposal was developed, from a own interface perspective, and
without design trend, proposing a playful and educational environment, based
on the comments, advice and experiences of the team and teachers, as seen in
the following Fig. 2, these were presented to the teachers of the school, where
their functionality and usability were evaluated, obtaining a negative response,
collecting comments that observed a slow learning, a graphic distraction due to
the use of colors and images, which made it difficult for students to have They
give a correct understanding of what happened, so they requested a redesign, as
well as the flow of the interfaces, if they were accepted so the following redesign
should propose a better interface but with the same flow.
Redesign After the first implementation, and due to the need for a redesign,
and as indicated by the Design thinking methodology, a quick response was
given, looking for an efficient solution, for which an investigation was determined
that determined, that the design trends, they presented better signifiers in the
interaction and acceptance of the users, within these, Google Material Design
showed a preference on the part of the majority of users [
Development The tools that were used are:
– Adobe XD as a tool for creating and designing prototypes in addition to
offering a collaborative environment. [
The questions of the surveys are made up of sections in which usability attributes are detailed, such as: Understandability, learning, operability, attractiveness and compliance, the questions are detailed in the Table 3: Application acceptance tests The application acceptance tests were made through usability questionnaire. The questionnaire comprises 5 dimensions of usability and was applied to high school students. The number students tested were 24, however two students did not answer all the questions, so we had two missing values. 3
In this section, we provide the results of the usability questionnaire. In Table 4, a descriptive information of usability is shown. We observe the usability has a mean value of 4.27 and standard deviation of 0.51, which means outstanding results. After all the processes involved in the development of this work and conducting the necessary tests to validate our proposal, we can conclude that the use of design thinking methodology contributes significantly to innovation because it involves all users in the process and can quickly respond to needs through redesigns. In the same way, we expect to see great results when testing different aspects of teaching physics.
We appreciate deeply to the Universidad Nacional de San Agust´ın de Arequipa, organization where we belong.