Children's Engineering Learning During Home Tinkering and Storytelling Activities

• In Event: Using Narratives to Create Engaging and Inclusive Engineering Experiences for Children and Families

Abstract

Objectives. Our project asks whether informal educational practices that encourage storytelling during tinkering can advance families’ engagement in authentic engineering practices. Essentially, we look to marry the power of stories for making learning stick with tinkering, a playful form of open-ended problem solving that is being widely adopted in the field of early childhood education. Using design-based research, we are exploring how different ways of encouraging storytelling can make family tinkering activities engineering-rich.

Perspective. This particular project was launched after COVID-19 led to the temporary closure of the museum. We adapted our research-in-service-to-practice work to study ways to design story-based tinkering activities for families to do at home. We created a video introduction to a tinkering activity – making a teeny-tiny playground - and using design-based research we iterated and tested ways of framing the activity to encourage families’ engagement in storytelling in ways that led to greater engagement in engineering practices during tinkering.

Methods. The video featured a museum educator introducing the problem and a number of steps to make a ride for a toy friend: get a toy friend, dream up ideas, find stuff (to use to make the ride, e.g., cardboard, glue, chopsticks), engineer the ride (make it, try it, fix it), and share a tinkering story. Over the past month, we have observed and analyzed the data from 11 families (5 White, 4 Latinx, 1 Middle-Eastern, 1 Mixed race) with 4- to 10-year-old children (M = 7.09 years; 8 girls) who watched the video and then engaged in the story-based tinkering activity. With data collection ongoing, we will present our results based on 35+ families at the conference. We present the teeny-tiny playground video, and observe the families as they tinker via Zoom. After tinkering, researchers ask participants to tell the story about their toy friend and their tinkering activities.

Results. Across iterations, we decreased the length of the video, and increased the emphasis on planning. In a third iteration, we also emphasized planning particularly for the toy friend who would use the ride. Across iterations, children talked increasingly about characters, F = 8.28, p < .05. Moreover, when talking about characters, 26% of the time children also spoke about engineering (e.g., planning, testing, fixing, redesigning). We will also present analyses of the narrative quality of children’s stories beyond talk about characters (i.e., setting and chronology, evaluations/motivations,), as well as the extent to which engineering talk coincided with these narrative elements.

Significance. Our initial results suggest that tinkering programs that encourage children to think and talk about story characters can foster higher quality storytelling and talk about engineering. Storytelling and character-focused tinkering activities may also make engineering more appealing to girls and diverse groups (Cunningham & Lachapelle, 2014; Dorsen et al., 2006), which is a further question we will address in our analyses. The work is pointing to design principles for story-based tinkering activities for families that can promote opportunities for engineering learning.

Authors

• Lauren Christine Pagano, Loyola University Chicago

• Graciela Solis, Loyola University Chicago

• Gabriela Perdomo, Loyola University Chicago

• Diana Acosta, Loyola University Chicago

• Naomi J. Polinsky, Northwestern University

• Autumn Crowe, Loyola University Chicago

• Catherine A Haden, Loyola University Chicago