Engaging Students with the DICE Model: Design Thinking, Innovation, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship

Abstract

DICE: Design, Innovation, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship is a new interdisciplinary Provost-level university course that is collaboratively developed by faculty from three colleges (COS, VSE, and CEHD) with a goal to engage students at Mason. Creativity and innovation require free thinking and a combination of top-down support and grass-roots innovation propelled by passion to make a deep impact. The focus of this course is on creating the next generation STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) scholars with (1) social/human focus, (2) interdisciplinary interest, and (3) entrepreneurial streak, who are empowered to break down disciplinary boundaries for solutions of deep impact on pressing human needs. Furthermore, the next generation STEAM students need to use "design thinking" to harness the state-of-the-art capabilities to innovate and multidisciplinary STEAM or similar approaches to solve real-world challenges which is a focus of this course. Student engagement in 21st century skills including communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking is an integral part of the course. In this session, we will share the implementation of this course that helped engage a group of students from Mason working with students from POSTECH University in South Korea to collaboratively work on global problem solving using DICE. We will explain how the DICE model can be modified and used in other settings/courses.