Instructor

Prof. Nishant Sharma

Semester

3rd

Course Difficulty

Easy to Medium

Time Commitment Required

1 hour lecture per week. 3 hours of labs per week. Very minimal self-study required

Grading Policy and Statistics

More than 80% of the students received AA or AB grades. Considering it was the first time this course was offered, grading was lenient. However, it is very likely that this won’t be the case in future offerings of the course.

Attendance Policy

Lectures were online, in the form of moodle videos. It was mandatory to watch the videos as they contained mini quizzes which contributed to the final grade. Attendance and participation in labs carried significant weightage in the final course total. Students were allowed to miss at most one weekly lab session, for valid reasons.

Teaching Style

Design thinking is a creative, human-centred, and user-focused approach to problem-solving and innovation. It is based on evidence of how people interact with products and services, which can be used to develop and improve new products, services, processes, and organisations. The course encourages students to create innovative solutions that address real-world problems. It was mostly a lab-oriented course. The labs were conducted very smoothly and in an organised manner. The professors were very enthusiastic in guiding students through the labs.

Feedback on Assignments/ Tutorials/ Projects

There were no homework assignments. The weekly lab sessions had a 2 hour long activity, which was graded. The activity involved application of the concepts introduced in the video lectures. Attendance, creativity and active participation is highly encouraged. The final project was essentially a conclusion to the course, based on all of the lab sessions.

Course Importance

Design Thinking is an important life skill, which can be used to solve many problems in one’s day-to-day life. The course presents an opportunity to create solutions for some of the problems one can actually relate with. It surely paves the way for future innovators and entrepreneurs.

Future Tracks

There are further courses in the Design department. The course equips students with a toolkit to solve real world problems. Thus knowledge of this course can also build up to courses in the entrepreneurship department.

Additional Comments

None

CS 213 Review By: Taniishq Kadam