Spring 2025

Design Thinking

A Guide to Innovation

  • Interest Level: Grade 7 - Grade 12
  • Reading Level: Grade 8

Design thinking is a six-step process used in creative problem solving to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create innovative solutions. As a human-centered approach to innovation, design thinking is used in everything from corporate structure in businesses such as UberEATS, AirBnB, and Adobe XD to local and regional projects.

Design Thinking, by author and educator Fred Estes, provides a simple, clear approach to the six-step design thinking process. This easy-to-follow guide explains everything essential to design thinking projects focused on solving human-centered, social issues. Readers will learn the fundamentals of each of the six-steps in the design thinking model—notice and reflect, empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test—and discover how to collaborate with people to develop solutions to real-world problems and create better communities through creativity, inspiration, and teamwork. With true stories of real student teams and their projects, this book provides readers with the steps to effect change and create a more equitable world.

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979-8-7656-0800-5
On pre-order until 03/04/2025
$28.99
979-8-7656-3886-6
On pre-order until 03/04/2025
$43.99
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Interest Level Grade 7 - Grade 12
Reading Level Grade 8
Genre Science, Young Adult
Category 5 Kinds of Nonfiction, SEL: B Self-Management, SEL: C Social Awareness, SEL: E Responsible Decision-Making, Social Emotional Learning
Copyright 2025
Publisher Lerner Publishing Group
Imprint Twenty-First Century Books ™
Language English
Number of Pages 176
Publication Date 2025-03-04
Text Type Informational/Explanatory
BISACS YAN055040, YAN050100, YAN058000
Dewey 670
Dimensions 6 x 9
Features Author/Illustrator biography, Bibliography/further reading, Charts/Graphs/Diagrams, Index, Reviewed, Sidebars, Source notes, Starred Reviews, Table of contents, and Websites

Author: Fred Estes

Fred Estes taught science for nearly two decades in a school near his home in San Francisco. He’s written several articles about science teaching, including “Compost: The Rot Thing for Our Earth” and he is a peer reviewer for a National Science Teaching Association journal. Before that, he taught high school English, worked as a financial analyst, joined an AI startup, developed corporate training programs, and earned a doctorate in educational psychology and technology. Currently, he teaches graduate students and teachers about design thinking, innovation, creative teaching methods, and hands-on-STEM curriculum.

Reviews

School Library Journal

“Ideal for teens, educators, and community leaders who want to inspire youth to apply design thinking in creating real-world solutions. The writing motivates readers to reflect on their own ideas with examples that make the concepts relatable. . . What distinguishes this book is its focus on practical, real-world applications.”—starred, School Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

“With clear organization and a focus on fostering growth and action, this guide to the design thinking process offers much to young innovators and the educators who empower them. . . Veteran educator Estes encourages a positive mindset built on empathy, collaboration, curiosity, and openness to differences that enhances learning and growth in all settings.”—Kirkus Reviews