Teaching Practice in the “Empathy Design Thinking” Course for Elementary School Students Grounded in Project-Based Learning

This study takes the innovative education course titled “Empathy Design Thinking” developed by the User Experience Research Center of Beijing Normal University for elementary school students as an example and introduces the three major teaching processes of the course: theme exploration, design expression and prototype production. The study also examines the course theme built through the context of a “smart home”, analyzes the whole process of the course using project-based teaching, shows the innovative solution design cases produced through the teamwork of four groups of students, and provides a reference for the teaching application of innovative education courses by combining the lecturers’ reflections on the teaching practices in this study.