Families' Sociomaterial Interactions During Inventing: Learning With Pinball Machines in a Museum

• In Event: Materiality and Sociomaterial Practices in Learning, Designing, and Making

Abstract

Purpose
Building on theories of sociomateriality (Orlikowski, 2007) that learning and meaning-making rely on interactions between technologies, places/spaces, and natural and designed objects present in everyday life, we posit that families learning together as they make pinball machines in a museum makerspace. Since an increasing number of museums have their own makerspaces, the learners’ interactions may be different from that of traditional exhibits. Thus, this study asks: how do family members interact with signage, making resources, and each other as they engage in making pinball machines?
Perspectives
Learning is constructed upon interactions with social and material resources (Pea, 2004). Analyzing the sociomateriality of the learning is relevant to informal spaces because objects, human bodies, technologies, and settings afford and constrain different actions (Fenwick, 2014) within a setting. Adapted from distributed cognition (Pea, 1993; 2004) and a sociotechnical framework (Authors, 2015), we consider four non-exclusive axes of sociomaterial interactions: (a) guided participation, (b) prior experiences and attitudes, (c) tools for making pinball machine, and (d) signage.
Methods and data sources
This study was conducted in Makerspace [blinded-for-review] in a museum. Families build a pinball machine by adding pins, rubber bands, and tubes to a wood vase (Figure 2). Comic-based signs that visually described the station were displayed. Over four days, 49 families consented to participate; for AERA, we focus on three cases: (a) Cade (8-year-old), his mother, and father, (b) Serena (8-year-old), Ginny (6-year-old), their mother and father, and (c) Cory (9-year-old) and his father. Video recordings were collected to conduct interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) based on the four axes above.
Results and substantiated conclusions
Our three cases illustrate that each family performed unique ways of sociomaterial interactions with signage and with each other, which led them to engage with inventing in different manners. In Cade’s and Serena’s families, parents used the signage when initiating the activity. Cade’s parents referred to the signage to describe what the station was about, and Serena’s father used the signage to show the potential shape of the pinball machine they would make. These parents used signage only for helping their children to initiate the activity; such patterns are different from interactions at traditional exhibits where parents repeatedly referred to signage (McManus, 1989).
Conversely, Cory, who mostly built alone with having his father as an observer, did not notice the signage. He rather looked at others’ works to get some building ideas. In our prior research (Authors, 2018), children also tended not to read signage first at a hands-on museum. Thus, having parents for guided participation may be critical for signage to be used for sociomaterial interactions. The differences between Cory’s and the other cases imply that one axis (i.e., guided participation) matters to another axis (i.e., signage), which shaped their patterns of sociomaterial interactions differently.
Scholarly significance
Our study advances understandings of how non-digital materials interact with families to support learning. Also, we highlight that how one aspect of the sociomaterial interactions axes shaped the patterns of families’ collective making.

Authors

• Yong Ju Jung, The University of Oklahoma

• Heather Toomey Zimmerman, The Pennsylvania State University