Interfamily Interaction at Family Making Workshops at Informal Learning Environments

• In Event: Making the Future: Addressing Critiques, Transitions, and New Challenges in Maker Education

Abstract

Objectives: This study investigates the role of inter-family interaction in influencing the families’ creative engineering practices and their products at a making and tinkering family program from four rural libraries and a museum. The goal is to explore how making activities provides opportunities for families to play a distributed role in influencing one another’s engineering learning and creativity.

Framework: We operationalized creative engineering practices as an activity that gives rise to externalized forms of novel and feasible ideas or solutions when families address the design problem. We developed an analytical framework bringing together distributed views of creativity (Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009) and everyday expertise framework (Bell, Bricker, Lee, Reeve, & Zimmerman, 2006) to explore how families’ sociomaterial experiences influenced families’ creative engineering practices and products.

Methods: This study focused on the second iteration of an hour-long engineering workshops in 2017 that was part of a larger design-based research. 75 participants consented. Two engineers led the workshops utilizing littleBits™. Participants were video-recorded (~32 hours). The unit of analysis was the parent-child pair in group to examine how the focal parent-child pair was influenced by other parent-child pairs and facilitators in the activity context. 30 parent-child pairs were analyzed. We identified inter-family episodes when the focal parent-child pair’s creative engineering practice was influenced by another by reviewing the transcripts. We characterized how inter-family episodes were initiated and in what ways they influenced the focal parent-child pair’s creative engineering practices and products. Emergent trends were reviewed to confirm findings.

Results: Findings illustrated that families’ creative engineering practices were influenced when they noticed and observed others’ design process and products after public sharing of ideas, prototypes, or products. Slight modification of idea was a predominant pattern that was noticeable in the dataset. Alice and Jeffery (11 years)’s family at Waterview library who created a glowing fidget spinner was influenced by James who publicly shared the idea of a fidget spinner. In other cases, sharing supported other families to engage in major design modification. Shelley and Jimmy (10 years)’s family had created a “no invention” using felt and a littleBits™ servo that allowed the felt to move side-to-side. However, when Julia (another family) shared an auto-greeter that incorporated a servo to create up-and-down direction, Jimmy grabbed his “no invention”, changed the servo to create the up-and-down movement with a happy face to create a “yes invention.” In this regard, Julia’s sharing influenced Jimmy’s family to notice the peripheral interaction in which materials are being used differently and provided opportunities to discover unperceived affordance of materials.

Significance: This study highlights that sharing a work space with other families have the potential to provide opportunities to notice, observe, and share one another’s design works and influence learners to engage in supportive instances of new idea generation during engineering design process. This finding opens up an area of future research to investigate new configuration of the distributed system at inter-family level that can support the development of learning communities (Bielaczyc & Collins, 1999) within informal learning settings.

Authors

• Soo Hyeon Kim, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis

• Heather Toomey Zimmerman, The Pennsylvania State University