Socio-Constructionist Design Thinking: Tools and Practices in Mainstream Education

Design Thinking (DT) has been widely promoted as a creative, human-centred approach for engaging students with real-world problems. Yet, research consistently shows that DT in mainstream schooling often struggles with ambiguity, superficial engagement with socio-scientific issues, weak integration of disciplinary knowledge, and epistemological tensions with school learning. In this paper, we examine whether DT can become more effective and educationally meaningful when enacted through a socio-constructionist environment using digital media as both design tools and design products. Drawing on a school-based intervention with 70 students using ChoiCo—an open-source digital authoring system for creating socio-scientific games—we analysed critical incidents of student interaction to explore how constructionist digital media mediate reasoning, collaboration, and conceptual development. Our findings show that ChoiCo supports conceptual clarity, iterative refinement, and epistemic grounding by requiring students to encode ideas into rules, thresholds, and consequences. The system’s malleability and embedded feedback align with a special socio-constructionist DT model developed through a multi-organisational European Research and Innovation Project ExtenDT2, enabling rapid prototyping and collaborative meaning-making. We argue that socio-constructionist DT offers a promising way to address long-standing shortcomings of DT in education, shifting the focus from producing polished artefacts to engaging in meaningful, iterative, and epistemically rich design activity. Implications for curriculum design, teacher practice, and the integration of constructionist digital media in DT pedagogy are discussed.