Developing creativity in computer science initial teacher education through design thinking

Design thinking is a valuable component in teacher education enabling the development of creativity amongst the cohort. Studies have been developed to capture the effects of discipline specific design thinking, however design thinking amongst Computer Science pre-service teachers has not been thoroughly evaluated. Pre-service Computer Science post-primary teachers will need to have the capacity to develop these skills within their initial teacher education programmes. In this paper we propose a design thinking workshop model for use by pre-service teachers to engage and motivate students while covering core CS concepts, using web application development. Computer Science as a subject at post-primary will enable students solve real-world problems through the design and creation of computational artefacts developed using a collaborative human-centred approach. Developing such artefacts requires particular skills, such as creativity and problem-solving and it will be necessary for Computer Science pre-service teachers to use innovative problem-solving approaches when fostering these skills. The paper will present the project implementation along with qualitative and quantitative findings. In particular this paper highlights the pre-service teacher perception of the benefits of design thinking in Computer Science particularly applicability in the domain and increased engagement. This, we argue, is critical in our understanding and important in their initial teacher education.