Fostering students creative thinking through inquiry-design-based STEM water purification project

Clean water scarcity driven by climate change, pollution, and population expansion calls for educational practices that empower students to creatively respond to sustainability challenges. This study investigated the impact of Inquiry-Design-Based Learning integrated within a STEM-oriented water purification project on high school students’ creative thinking. A quasi-experimental design involving tenth-grade students compared outcomes between a design-based STEM intervention and a traditional inquiry approach. Students’ creative thinking was assessed through four dimensions: fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. The findings show that the design-based STEM intervention led to greater improvements in fluency, flexibility, and originality than conventional inquiry learning. Students engaged in iterative processes of ideation, prototype construction, testing, and refinement, which enabled them to generate and adapt ideas more divergently. By situating problem-solving in a real-world context, designing low-cost water purification devices using recycled materials, the project simultaneously fostered creativity and strengthened awareness of sustainability issues. The novelty of this study lies in demonstrating how iterative design embedded in inquiry explicitly enhances distinct facets of creative thinking in secondary science classrooms. Overall, the findings highlight the potential of design-based STEM pedagogy to cultivate creative problem-solving while supporting global goals for clean water and responsible environmental action.