"Design Thinking Bootcamp: My First Month as a Computer Science Freshman"

Introduction:

???When I first entered SNS College of Engineering as a freshman in Computer Science Technology, I was wondering about what “Design Thinking” actually is, as it was the main methodology of teaching in the institution. Well, here I am after a month of my freshman year, writing an article on what I learned about Design Thinking during the “Design Thinking Boot camp” along with my experiences during the first month of my freshman year.

Design Thinking BootCamp:

???Our college conducted a “Design Thinking Boot camp” for the freshers from November 18th to November 25th, 2022. It was a well-organized and scheduled boot camp focusing on helping students understand the design thinking process.

????Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that has five phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.

?

Phase 1: Empathize – Research your users' needs. In this phase, you should gain an empathetic understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve, typically through user research. Empathy is crucial to a human-centered design process such as design thinking because it allows you to set aside your own assumptions about the world and gain real insight into users and their needs.

?

Phase 2: Define – State your users' needs and problems. In this phase, you should analyze the observations and synthesize them to define the core problems you and your team have identified. These definitions are called problem statements. You can create personas to help keep your efforts human-centered before proceeding to ideation.

?

Phase 3: Ideate – Challenge assumptions and create ideas. In this phase, you’re ready to generate ideas. The solid background of knowledge from the first two phases means you can start to “think outside the box”, look for alternative ways to view the problem, and identify innovative solutions to the problem statement you’ve created. Brainstorming is particularly useful here.

?

Phase 4: Prototype – Start to create solutions. This is an experimental phase. The aim is to identify the best possible solution for each problem found. Your team should produce some inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product (or specific features found within the product) to investigate the ideas you’ve generated. This could involve simply paper prototyping.

?

Phase 5: Test – Try your solutions out. In this phase, evaluators rigorously test the prototypes. Although this is the final phase, design thinking is iterative: teams often use the results to redefine one or more further problems. So, you can return to previous phases to make further iterations, alterations, and refinements – to find or rule out alternative solutions.

?

????The staff assigned to the boot camp made the sessions fun, interactive, and informative. We had a lot of enjoyment and at the same time understood the design thinking process in the best way possible. We were then made to apply the same process to a real-life problem as a project and present the paper prototypes as teams (My Project: https://bit.ly/3VTIeOX)

Freshman's Week:

????We, the students of CST, CSE and CSD, then had Freshman’s Week from November 28th to December 3rd, 2022. We were educated about LinkedIn, how to create/maintain a LinkedIn Profile and it's career-related benefits . We also learned about Prepinsta, IBM, and other learning portals in which we could develop our coding and placement related skills. We also had a Low Code Development Boot camp in which we were made to code an app using MIT App Builder, which is based on Low Code Development. On December 2nd, we, had our first Outbound Training to Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve, Anaikatti.

Conclusion:

????In conclusion, my first month of college at SNS College of Engineering has been a great start to my college life. From the Design Thinking Boot camp to Freshman's Week and the Outbound Training, I have had a lot of enjoyment and gained a lot of information. I am excited for the adventures and experiences that the next four years of college will bring.