Investigating the use of anchoring for promoting design thinking

There has been an increased emphasis on integrating design thinking in every aspect of student learning at an early stage. However, teachers still lack the resources and scaffolds to facilitate such integration. In this paper, I present a way for scaffolding design thinking in middle school classrooms by using incomplete models as anchors. Findings show that the use of an incomplete seed model as an anchor evoked different responses from the student designers – some extending it immediately, some returning back to it after exploring other design options, and some likely referring to it implicitly. The incomplete seed model provided an example to the students for practicing design thinking and make tradeoffs. The incompleteness also allowed students to pursue different design trajectories.