Design Thinking in App Inventor Game Design and Development: A Case Study

Design thinking is considered as a creative, humancentred, participative, exploratory and problem-solving process that values different perspectives of a problem. In this study, we bring the design thinking in a curriculum framework of K-12 game creation by App Inventor which is currently popular block based programming environments for fostering Computational Thinking. In a case study on a middle-school students game creation course in Beijing, the students' creative thinking process and computational thinking skill are investigated in order to understand perceptions of App Inventor and physics cognitive knowledge involved in the game creation. The future work is to construct a framework of integrating the Design Thinking for cultivating K-12 students' computational thinking.